There was an issue in the server 2003 terminal services audio stack where if you were running a bunch of concurrent audio streams it would get confused on where it was directing the audio and send little snippets of audio to the wrong seat. The terminal services environment I was running had upwards of 60 concurrent thin clients connected and there was always a few people listening to streaming audio, and one guy who REALLY liked watching porn at work. So almost every day when people were using them while listening to music there would be these tiny blips of audio of women moaning cutting in. Got fixed with 2008, I assume by properly threading the audio processing rather than whatever the hell they were doing in 2003.
It's not threading in the computer sense, just containing the entire runtime audio status in a process or driver that's confined to a "session" (which for processes is a process grouping that can be shown as a task manager column, for drivers is the virtual address range from 0xA0000000 to 0xBFFFFFFF being shared among all processes in that terminal but no others, and for in-memory named objects is an NT native name space directory like \Sessions\3).
The windows shared audio stack has always been notoriously shit. That's why any sound card worth a damn has an ASIO driver and just skips the stack all together. Mac OS's Core Audio is so much better than the Windows Sound Stack will ever be.
Hello from founder of NComputing. Awesome video to remind me the days we made this model. X300 and its successor models (X350, X550) had sold to school computer labs in US and many developing countries at the same time (over 3 million seats!!!). Many countries' Dept of Education had selected this platform to save the budget and give more internet access to kids. All these models are no longer installable to latest computer since X-series used standard PCI slot (today's computer has PCI Express slot not old PCI slot). NComputing is producing newer model, MX100s (using standard ethernet plug) which leverages NComputing's SoC ARM chip (Numo Chip) instead of FPGA. (we made our own SoC). Or really cool new product that uses Raspberry Pi board called RX-series. Back in the day, NComputing and Microsoft had agreed and promoted this platform to use with Microsoft Server OS only to be compliant with EULA, but we saw consumer techie users attempted to use with Desktop OS which worked well too. We don't recommend to use such a way though. NComputing is now 19 years old, we keep providing thin client computing including hardware and also software such as LeafOS (you can freely download and use it for your old PC to repurpose), VERDE VDI (affordable enterprise VDI like Citrix, VMware) so on. My last advice is .... please do not buy X300, X350, X550 model in the market if you see, these are already 12-15 years old one, and you can not install to old or new PC no matter. (also don't try counterfeit or clones Chinese products). AGAIN, THANK YOU for our 5 million devices users since 2003. We commit to keep developing disruptive end user computing solution in cloud era. Please try "RX420(RDP)" and "LeafOS".
This looks like it was a great product and thanks for commenting. I hope this post moves closer to the top. Was he correct about the theory of operation?
Be careful around Microsoft it's not the same company it was 10 years ago it's run by people obsessed with stock prices going up and everything else doesn't matter.
I ran a couple of computer labs in a very poor school district here in Texas about twelve years ago using an off the shelf gaming computer (because I could order it with extra memory) and an ncomputing setup. It was about the only way we could do it (my yearly budget before grants or begging for additonal funds was only about 4k for the district). It wasnt perfect but it got more students online.
Another fantastic deep dive into obscurity! The amount of time this obviously took to make is, well. I get anxious just thinking about it. Superb work. Loved the analogy of Pentium 4 freight engines being used to sharpen pencils. This reinvigorates my plans to dive into the Buddy B-210 system a viewer sent in a while back, which promises to do the same thing - only using a 100MHz Pentium 1 with 32MB RAM on Windows 95. Ha. Granted it's only two virtual desktops, but still.
Thanks man! In re that buddy - my money says it's a single board computer, w95 is a bit too sophisticated for any funky TSR context switching nonsense I feel, but I'd be very interested to see if I'm right.
@@CathodeRayDude Oh hey! I can't tell you about the Buddy B-210, but the B-200 was basically a Cirrus Logic graphics chip ISA card with some software to make all the magic happen. I can tell you for sure there wasn't a computer in there, but to this date I am not sure how they managed to make it all work. I can tell you that it was very finicky and delicate, at least with their early drivers/software.
@@SpyAlelo outstanding! That sounds fascinating then. Maybe after @LGR is done with it, if the modus operandi isn't apparent I can take a stab at working it frontwards to back.
@@CathodeRayDude That would be great! That was a very long time ago, but if you have questions or hit a blocker reach out to me. I'll share what I remember.
I came to the comment to mention what I remembered as the “Buddy PC” but LGR said it first and has even got one. I look forward to seeing you put it to the test. My memory is that it pretty much worked but with annoying glitches.
This gentleman has a very excellent delivery system: Clear speach, intelligent smooth transition dialog, pleasant voice and enthusiasm. First class integrated graphics.
He does otherwise quarter of a million viewers would not be watching a video that does a deep dive on a device that has zero impact in your computing today. I mean it's pointless, not like you were thinking about going and getting one of these devices. I guess there is some nostalgia if you are old enough to remember this era in computing so that has some charm to it, but I think it's his delivery that keeps people tuned in, it sounds like he is a gifted individual. I am sure just like in anything you practice you can improve speech delivery and keeping an audience engaged is something you can get better with practice, but no doubt for some people int's a gift that they are born with, something that happens naturally and in my opinion this gentleman is one of those gifted individuals who can keep you engaged and listening about something that is completely pointless today. If I were this guy, I would have 5 girlfriends, a wife and I would audition for some type of news casting role or hosting a tv show, I would even recommend he makes some UA-cam videos.
Thank-you for your thoughts. Truly, I am old enough to remember before micros were invented, where we had to hard code on mainframes. Best wishes, Cordially microuser@@SavageThrone
I've never seen your channel, and I can't recall having seen any of your videos before.. but for some reason UA-cam suggested this video for me. I'm positively captivated by the entire video. Awesome subject, beautifully presented, with amazing detail and research. You've earned a subscriber, on the basis of this single video, on an esoteric piece of tech I never have, and never will own. Keep up the awesome!
Definitely, same here never heard of this gentleman (I'M assuming he's a MAN)....Issss that oooook? "Society's issue not mine (NOT A DIG AT HIM!)or channel but I find older tech nostalgia video's fascinating (I grew up in the super late 80's/90's got my 1st IBM clone a Fancy Dancy Packard Bell for Christmas of 92 with a 48MHZ Intel CPU and a 400 Megabyte Hard-Drive and tore it down 2 days after I got it BOY.....was my father PISSED OFF but put it back perfectly and led me down the road of computers/ IT something that year started doing basic Hard-Drive replacements Ram upgrades proprietary ISA Slot cards Power supply etc.. He'd even have to Fib and say he or his 20 year old son was doing it not that his untrained learned on the fly 7-8 year old son....lolthat I've done all my life after & currently working in computer / IT fields my father always says that was the cheapest trade school education he's ever seen but strange/unknown working odd Technologies that can be put together to solve odd business problems in oddly wonderful crazy ways LOVE A CHALLENGE ! I'LL BE GOING DOWN A RABBIT HOLE THIS EVENING! KEEP IT UP!
Yep, that's the whole idea of the "suggestions" feature; other stuff we enjoy, that also happens to keep us watching the 'Tube. I, too, am happy that UA-cam figured that since I like Technology Connections, Video Game Historian (I'm guessing here), and I don't know, maybe the visual style of Prophet of Zod? Therefore, I would probably like Cathode Ray Dude... Whatever the algorithmic impetus, it's right on, and I do, indeed!
Cool video! I was the founder/CEO of a company that ended up acquired by 2X/Parallels, that created a 'Citrix' like product (basically, remote sessions for users using multi-session OSs like Windows Server 2003. 2008 and so on back in the day). You are correct that even according to Microsoft, at the time, they did accept this as 'legal' if you had all the XP licenses for every person connecting to this (I heard this from them directly and even had emails confirming it). Also note that with Windows XP SP2 BETA, multi-user RDP was possible. It was later removed from the final SP2 build and that is how many people implemented multi-user RDP on XP, by simply using the required files off the BETA SP2. Really awesome video here, bringing so many great memories about the early days of remote desktop.
About the Plateau: Ive been saying for many years putting an SSD into an old machine often completely revives it, in terms of usability for some people. The processing power might actually be there, but its the storage medium speeds that are holding things back. I know my father still uses his 2011 Thinkpad, I used the same model for years, with only the main reason for upgrading was that my mother wanted a laptop for when she doesn't feel like sitting at her desk, and I wanted something more light weight. I didn't need that much of a processor speed upgrade, since I use my desktop for most things.
New SSD (only cost me 35 bucks) plus maxing out the RAM made a huge difference on this laptop a few years ago. I went from 4gigs to 16. The difference was almost as big as when I switched from Win7 to Linux. 4 gigs of RAM in windows and it used to crash and need restarted all the time. 4 gigs of RAM in linux and it would just periodically get stuck for a bit and start working again. Now with 16 gigs it never gets stuck.
@@godsinbox Tbh mechanical drives are actually a terrible design idea in portable devices, cause anything mechanical in nature hates vibrations, and portable things by their very nature are exposed to a lot of vibrations. Imo the beat thing for laptops would be to have an eeprom to hold the system files, and an ssd to hold data. That way you don't need to wait for the disk to initiate to be able to boot the base system.
Funny you mention thinkpad specifically. I just ordered a new $380 HP laptop yesterday, but almost went for a ten year old TP for $120. I may still get that one too, put in some extra ram and an ssd.
In Brazil ncomputing made a huge success, here the models didn´t have host card, and worked using common network, and yes, in the begining used modified files of rdp to work, and a lot of windows updates break it, and you have to wait the new version ofncomputing "driver". Here microsoft get to sue companies that used, alleging piracy and because that.. sales droped, and ncomputing changed the sales pich changed to use servers and rdc licences, or xenserver. sorry for my bad english.
Makes perfect sense if N Computing had their customers sign a disclaimer that said “we have the licenses to do this”. They reduced their liability enough that Microsoft didn’t bother suing them. Your English is way better that my Portuguese that’s for sure!
Well that makes sense. I just could not believe that Microsoft was standing by and did nothing about this. Shame it was a bit scummier approach than what CRD thought of. I guess they made more money by suing individual companies that used this product than by suing the company that made it, lol
The way you usually can get the code from an fpga is that its actually not stored on the fpga, its stored on an SPI flash chip in 99% of cases. You can’t just read the code universally because every fpga manufacturer and series has a different bitstream, but there are quite a few bitstreams that have been reverse engineered and have been made open-source, with software able to turn the bitstream into verilog in order to verify that the stream has been copied correctly
That commentary about how if you only do one task you can keep the same old PC for decades is why I actually went to university with a 1999 iBook to take notes in classes.... in 2017
Back in 02 I took a 486 laptop to college for my typing, programming, and web publishing courses! The instructor laughed at me, I was like hey, it does everything I need for class! The class laughed too. It was almost 2" thick (Dell xpi)
yep, used an X20 (2002) in 2016 as well, now I have an X220 (2012) I still use almost daily. I just got an L412 (2010) from the trash bin at work as a workbench PC. It's just for looking up datasheets, some programming, interfacing with measuring equipment and some graphing/data handling. For these applications you really don't need a lot of power, hell every USB device, that I'm currently using it with, would work with a USB 1.1 port as well.
I’d love a follow-up video where you push this to it’s limit. Something like a first-gen Core i7 with matching motherboard, that has 2 PCI slots and running on a SATA SSD.
I second this notion. You could go even further and run it on modern hardware with a PICe to 2x PCI extender, like the "Sintech PCI-E Express X1 to Dual PCI Riser Extender Card." In which case the bottleneck will end up being 4GB of RAM I would guess..
It is interesting to see this being used on such limited machines. Cranking the CPU and mobo to what this could theoretically support would be pretty neat, though probably not enough for a full video.
I'm from an country in development and we had these. They used to run 6 machines from one tower with windows XP. By the time i was graduating they updgraded the systems to 4 machines per tower with windows 7. I remember we used to make fake desktop shortcuts that would run a shutdown command that would turn off the tower. Good times. Thanks for remind me of this. I remember when i told my parents about it they tried to get one for our house since we only had 1 pc for a bunch of kids.
In america, I was in a similar situation. We had an old tower with an old GPU, and were able to run some games. Cannot remember the computer specs, just that it was better than my 2015 laptop I got a year after we got the desktop, which had a 1.6ghz dual core, 4gb ram, and a hdd. Was able to play a cracked version of Subnautica v2828, which had about 11-21 fps... these ncomputing things could have helped us, as the one desktop could be used for schoolwork, and we had 6 kids needing it at times... would have saved a bunch of money we didnt have, instead of buying laptops every other year.
I got a free copy of Office 97 once because the teacher at Tennessee Technology Center tried to copy the Office disc onto a CD-RW to install on all the class computers and protect the original but the drives in a lot of the first generation pentium machines couldn't read the -RW disc. She threw it away and I fished it out of the trash and took it home and it worked fine on our home PC :)
Someone donated an Office 97 upgrade version disc to my school, and I vividly remember installing MS Works 5.0 on every single PC and then using the upgrade disk to install Office 97 on each of them. Good times.
It's been quite a while, but I remember being able to get past Office 97's license screen with just filling it with ones ( "1111111111" ). I think I figured that out one day because I couldn't find it, got frustrated, and randomly tried it. I might be misremembering, but I do remember ambivalently feeling like both a genius and an idiot.
I work at a University and we used the NComputing X300 in one of our labs for a while as part of a “green computing” initiative. Students needed to use USB drives, so we had USB extension cables and assigned a USB port to each station as you described. However, it would sometimes crash when people inserted their USB drives. It wasn’t fun to see four stations go down while people were using them during finals, but I guess we were pushing the limits.
Fun fact: terminal services/remote desktop is still being used for a variety of unexpected things. For instance, extreme sandboxing of web browsers (run the browser tab in a very limited account and remote it into the main session), and WSL graphics (runs a Wayland server in Linux that exposes itself as a very fancy RDC server). (Source: interestingly, the WSLg blog post)
Took a 3 years computer/electronic course in 2010, then on a field trip we went to a university where they were making a lot of studies with several components, like new CPU cooldown systems, etc, etc, a professor there started asking us which course we were taking, which profession we would love to follow, and when she knew what we were studying she immediately told us that we had no future, because the future wasn't refurbishing, but throw out and buy new, pretty sad as that actually got stuck in my head and the next years seeing how the industry was going through the route she said, made me just step back from this area completely. I'm glad that currently the industry is being pushed to a refurbish mindset instead of a throw out buy new.
Saddest thing nowadays is that it is the software industry that is making everything they can to keep the throw out and buy new model hanging on. Software vendors - most painfully with the proprietary software for a proprietary services where end user has no alternatives - keep pushing forced updates with completely unnecessary requirements for HW resources and new OS versions which are also more and more bloated, and in worst cases, such as with mobile devices, HW-proprietary. Vast majority of today's software is a pile of crap with more and more bloat, less and less useful functionality, and more and more horrible UIs.
@@TheSimoc I'm reminded of how Halo 2 was 'Vista Only'. even tho its a Dx9 Game. ..WTF? Yeah, it was an Artificial limit imposed by the Installer. Razor1911 seen to THAT with their nice 'boot-loader' - I had Halo 2 running on WinXP-sp2 back in what, 2006? Just goes to show what power we keep voting away. 80s corporate-law nonsense & the Dark Age of Information.
Damn that professor is a complete suckered, though kind of right about our ridiculous culture on excessive consumerism. Fixing the old, upgrading the current is the way to go if we want too keep living on this planet. And it's fun and cheap sometimes.
I have a feeling Microsoft saw how this was actually being used and took the same kind of stance we've seen adobe take. The exposure to windows over macintosh was more important than the lost license sales to schools and institutions that probably would have pirated windows anyhow.
Yea, going after a company catering mostly to poor institutions or developing countries would have probably gained them no extra license sales, less exposure to windows, extra legal work and potentially bad PR. Imagine some news outlet getting wind of this and running a headline along the lines of "Microsoft is preventing schools from making affordable computer labs!". As the video says, it's all about the money, and there probably wasn't any in shutting down NComputing. Now, if they were going after the big business market, it would have been a very different story.
I remember being in Catholic school in 2001. The computer lab consisted of 35 PCs, all with the same copy of Windows 98, and I'm pretty sure we 'borrowed' that license key from someone else.
@@AriosFireFeathers Plus if schools buy a site licence from Microsoft, it comes as a schools agreement which is normally based on how many staff/students they have, not how many machines they run. So it doesn't matter to Microsoft if it was 1 machine to a student or 1 machine between 7, they got paid the same and the exposure to their software was higher. This may have been a factor in N Computing not advertising to home or business markets, but focusing on schools.
@@PeterGrant Plenty of businesses used enterprise licenses to run hundreds of computers on a single license, as you got a roll of stickers with it, linked back to the original, and so long as you used the same supplier for your IT, you got the license essentially free. Same now with Win10/11 enterprise, you have a virtual XP machine you can use, which has a separate license for it, generated by the enterprise machine for it. Done because so many things will only run on XP, so wrapping it in a more secure supported OS is better, though even that embedded XP copy does get it's own updates, as MS still provides extended support to paying customers, like the DOD.
I'm from a 3rd world country and I remembered that I talked once with the IT head of my city and he told me that when windows 7 was released they called the him to talk about upgrading all the city computers(public school computer labs and more) from XP to 7 but because it was a few hundred of computers they didn't had then budget and the salesman tried to sell with EOL of windows XP and more, in the end of the talk the MSFT rep asked what they would do when XP went EOL, he said that he doesn't know but probably use alternative solutions. Because there was a lot of machines on computer labs at public schools, after a few weeks they got free licenses upgrade for every machine.
Each of your videos improves on itself, every time. This feels like a full on lecture that I would happily attend at a computing seminar but it's even better, because I got to attend it from home, in 4K 60!
I saw this product at CES in 2007. I immediately came home and ordered it just to demo it. Just as you said it works perfect for basic tasks. We tried to suggest it to a few clients but nobody was interested or could understand it. And I’m just sitting on a shelf for years. But definitely an interesting product. Glad to see you made a video about it.
Honestly dude, this was one of the most interesting PC videos on UA-cam in at least two years for me! Kick ass, dude, I hope you are putting out more of this.
I'm running a 3570K with 16GB of RAM and a 1050TI. I won't need to replace the thing for years to come. I program, run many VM's and occasionally game. And since I'm a happy Linux user it won't ever be artificially obsoleted.
@@fabiosemino2214 If Limited SSD Write Endurance wasn't a thing I'd totally agree with you. It's best to have the maximum ram your machine will take / you can reasonably afford to keep from ruining the SSD with eleventy trillion pagefile writes.
I replaced my 3770k machine not because I needed to (was super snappy till the day I decommissioned it), but purely because I wanted to. Sandy/Ivy Bridge will likely survive the heat death of the universe.
@@mrflamewars indeed, or if your use case allows it using Linux works well, my parents small power rig basically is turned on 24/7 and its Samsung 840 it's basically almost a quarter of it's project writes life with about 6 to 12 gb ram during it's lifespan
A few years ago, where I worked, we had a video editing lab with standard definition broadcast quality capture cards (DPS Perception). They supported Premiere, but also offered their own video editing system which some of our users preferred. This software only ran on machines with Perception capture cards, but required a dongle as well, because, of course a £5,000 video capture card isn't enough of a dongle.
Yeah, my 1.2 ghz Athlon-A lasted from May 2000 to January 2007 - almost seven years. It eventually sucked for gaming with my ATI Radeon and could not keep up with Doom 3 / Half Life 2.
Yeah, I eventually realized that whenever your pc starts feeling slow for games it’s usually better to just get a good graphics card instead of updating the whole pc. I was able to keep a late 2006 model Mac Pro from 2007 to 2016 by updating the graphics card around 2014 or so. (To be fair this was a pretty good machine back in the day and I did install a different graphics card in it shortly after getting the machine)
"In the last 20 years I've been hard pressed to figure out what Microsoft is adding in each release, other than a much worse UI." That's the modern business plan for everyone, isn't it? I think it's called "software as a service".
Meanwhile I'm laughing while using GNU / FOSS software that gets better and more useable over time, I'm actually learning to use Garuda Dragonized Linux on my laptop before installing it on my desktop too. The constant bloat and increasingly locked down useableility is annoying enough with W10, and now Windows 11 is looking a *Lot* like Windows 8 mark 2 trying to be a tablet OS again and I hated that more than enough the first time. So yeah, a weird little Linux / Windows tangent, love the video, what a wacky little hardware/software setup for setting up a computer lab
@@UNSCPILOT I have the exact opposite experience regarding FOSS software. It seems to me that in the late 90's early 2000's, you would find a free alternative for everything you wanted. Nowadays, almost all of these so called free software have some sort of pricing and licensing scheme behind them if you want to use the fully featured version. dont get me wrong, i dont mind devs wanting to get paid, but i dont feel like this "FOSS" community really still exists.
@@raycharles1752 I have to wonder what programs you're using. The bread-and-butter of the Linux World productivity software has been totally free for a long time, and looks like it always will be. I'm talking about LibreOffice and gimp. Sure, if you want to use enterprise software, you will be paying accordingly, but I've never seen any of the standard desktop applications adopting a freemium model.
I grew up in an incredibly poor town in Texas and we had these in our computer lab. This was around 2010 and I was in high school. We had Pentium 4 machines (yes, in 2010) split out to 4 or 5 stations each.
XP (while in beta) did briefly allow for multiple users to be using a single computer (one locally and one remotely) with separate desktops, but the released version didn't allow that. You could for a while, replace one of the files in the released version with the file from the beta and regain the functionality. I'm guessing that this company made use of a hacked version of that.
This is amazing. Nothing like a knowledgable nerd with the energy to make something high effort. Thank you for this. I've been in computing for over 20 years and didn't know this existed. Thanks for going so deep, thanks for being such a great communicator, thanks for making something so accessible and explaining it so well.
Amazing video, man. Super fascinating and you're so good at explaining stuff. Loving your channel. You're up there with LGR and Techmoan and Technology Connections!
I've noticed many years ago, when I found my uncle was still using the computer I helped him buy years previous, that old computers are still just fine *if* you use the period software as well. If you're not being forced into updates and an ever more bloated system partition, the computer can just keep doing what it's been doing.
Yes. Unfortunately many very same or at least functionally same kind of services on the web, and not to mentioned proprietary-application ones, have replaced their websites, supported apps, and protocols into new ones which do not work on old omputers anymore, and almost always are unnecessarily more bloated and less useful than their former versions.
About two years ago I helped out a friends uncle, they had gotten a new Laptop and wanted me to help set it up and transfer over all of the photos from the old PC. The old PC was still running Windows XP and was never connected to the Internet. They had Internet and wifi with the ISP router but the PC was not connected, only their smartphones were. So I first wanted to look at the old PC and start the file transfer (in hindsight this was the best idea of that whole endeavor, that thing hat USB 2 only) onto a USB device. So we turned the PC on and it took forever (this was a budget machine from the discounter, probably from when XP was still new), the thing here was, I was getting restless, not to say distressed, while for him this was normal (at this point the laptop was still unopened in the box, as to be able to return it, should I say it's utter garbage). Meanwhile I was used to the OS and all daily used programs being loaded instantly from an SSD but he was totally calm, for him this PC was still the fastest a PC was...he used it the same as the day he'd gotten it. Needless to say he was blown away by the laptop.
I still have a Dell laptop running XP that I keep only because there is one program that cannot run on later models. I only need it once or twice a year.
Yep, I was a tech aide for the IT dept at my high school at the time these released and we basically used them as a cheaper way to replace a buncha badly aging Pentium III machines in our main computer lab. They actually worked quite well, though we had to lock away the main PCs on each row after some kids quickly discovered they could sabotage 4 of their peers work by force power cycling their own PC lol
@@olddrunkninja that was something I was curious about. Since the host PC is basically controlling every session, you can't really make that into a student device without some jenky lockout i'd imagine.
My trade school had this setup 20 users on a server using the Ncomputering termals and there was one setup reserved that was for the IT personal. He was surprized that I tried to use task manger and figure what that pc specs are and all the 20 user were using internet. The video playback is tearing bad.
@@camthesaxman3387 re: "core 2 duo is no slouch." True that. BIG improvement over the Pentium series .... stilling running C2D here on a 2008 Dell Optiplex ... and Win Xp to boot! Using Mypal browser 'cuz nothing else works tho ...
Awesome video. I lived through these days of the PC and you're exactly right. Thanks for a trip down memory lane. You've got a great presentation style. Subscribed after this video - my first from your channel.
Yeah, so referencing the whole licencing debacle. I'm like 99% sure Microsoft would basically have just asked the owners of this device if audited, to buy each "client" a licence and called it a day. at the end of the day, they make money only on the software licenses, not hardware. I work for IT in a medium sized company that has been audited by Microsoft, and as long as you have as many licences as are really being "used" they pretty much just give you a pass against weird use cases like this. if you don't have the licences, you have a grace period to obtain said licenses in order to be compliant. You're totally right btw about terminal services, what you said makes 100% complete sense. and for "Lab" use I have hacked the Terminal Services to allow regular windows to log in multiple clients via mstsc. they are almost certainly doing that too.
I did that audit, and turns out we actually had more Windows 98 packs than machines, because a few of the ones installed had been upgraded to use as servers, so had a NT license on them instead. I was building them assembly line, so the first drive was simply cloned onto the rest, with the installer halted at the first reboot, which is where it asks for the key. All the install files were stored in a directory, along with the installer (thanks MS for putting all the cabinets in one place along with setup.exe) so the clones simply had the key entered after starting for the first time, and carried on from there. All the drivers for the various parts, motherboard, processor, network card, display, keyboard, mouse, were all in that directory as well, so just a case of pressing enter a half dozen times after that to get a desktop. Unopened pack went in the case, just in case it was needed at some time. When somebody asked for a disk I would simply give them one from the pile, but not the COA, as you can remove the disk and COA without actually opening the shrink pack. Later on XP upgrades were done using hardware changes, to get the cheap copy, so there were a lot of new printer cables bought, along with a few new keyboards and mice, to trigger the hardware change thing. Good number of those cables went to the recycler still in the bag, never used.
@@SeanBZA waaay back in the day i remember getting caught by the "your hardware has changed you need a new key" thing on XP a few times, usually calling the hotline would resolve it without buying anything XP's licensing was always a bit mental, there were so many caveats with OEM keys / retail discs etc etc, thankfully Nlite strips it out for retro gaming purposes, install from Nlite version of XP, stick random XP COA to machine and off you go. Win 7 / 8 / 10 are really pleasant by comparison, installing win10 but only have a win7 COA?, windows installer doesnt care!
Also remember that Edu sector often has other prices and options. I work with Office 365 and the edu prices are either free or way lower than business licenses.
Also, schools. MS would have been more lax about schools, for entirely selfish reasons. Firstly because of the bad PR that comes from taking legal action against a sector seen as working to the public good - about the only that would hurt their reputation more than suing a school would be suing a hospital. And secondly because schools are training up future Windows and Office users - if the school can't afford Windows, they might be desperate enough to even try linux, as terrible as that was back then. MS would rather people just pirate windows than see that happen.
Astounding. No virtualization, no docker, no kubernetes, efficient hardware usage in 2004. Are there any solutions like that today? Instead of relying on server farms you can split your computational power
Now any reasonably modern PC could do all of this with virtual machines pretty easily. You would just need some way to allocate input devices and displays to specific VMs and you could probably do it with of the shelf hardware.
My work desktop runs Ubuntu and KVM to host 2 Windows 10 VMs. I RDP to those Win10 VMs from my laptop, no matter where I'm at (remote, in the data center, or sitting at my desk). We have a "budget" VDI for contractors to remote into that has the same setup, but with 3 Windows 10 VMs. I could easily run 5 Windows 10 VMs on this same mid-tier desktop system.
I experimented with ncomputing tech back in that era and we deployed thousands of their l300 units in our warehouses (they call them zero clients). They are still deployed to this day and work great. As I see you’ve realized, ncomputing is still around and innovating. They are heavy into the vdi space. Glad you found their x300, I have one somewhere as well as an exemplar of all their other client tech from that time.
Those FPGAs (at least that old) have no internal non-volatile storage of their own, so the configuration data is almost always loaded from a little flash chip next to it on power-up. That flash chip would be easy to dump, but best I can tell there's nothing you can do with that. Unless you're insanely skilled and have a LOT of time, or you're the chip manufacturer. That's because it's basically going into one huge shift register inside the chip that configures all the stuff in there, and there's no public or easily-discoverable info on how the bit stream maps to the internal layout. Also often the whole thing is encrypted. You'd be way better off just reverse-engineering the functionality from the outside.
That's kind of what I figured. You know, I didn't look up the chip that I called a ram chip, now that I think about it, I wonder if it's possible that this thing just RAMDACs directly out of system memory, and that chip is actually a PROM.
@@CathodeRayDude Nah that's a RAM chip for sure, Samsung K4S something. FPGAs do have some memory cells that can be used for small RAM or cache but typically a design with any kind of complexity will want some larger external RAM to operate. That doesn't necessarily mean it's acting as video RAM, but it probably is in this case. The flash chip, if there is one, would be a small 8-pin chip or something like that. I don't actually see one though, so maybe it's actually being configured over PCI by the driver! Does it take a few extra seconds to become active after booting?
@@kasamikona yup, it doesn't output anything unless the "bus enumerator" driver is installed, so perhaps they rolled in the firmware push to that. That makes more sense compared to what I remembered about how fpgas worked at this time
@@CathodeRayDude That's a rather neat way of doing that to be honest, keeping costs down. The CPLD programming is non-volatile so it can happily sit there waiting for that configuration data to blast at the FPGA (around 1.2Mbit max for this chip by the way), no onboard flash needed. Also a "firmware update" could come for free just by updating the driver.
There are some Flash-based FPGA where you can leave the bitstream installed in the chip (I think the Spartan 3f variant for example) but I think they were more expensive and maybe slower?
I'm a lot younger, and was in elementary in 2010s. I can still remember the school using ncomputing. It was pretty cool, as you could send messages from computer to computer and do all sorts of things. I remember windows 8.1 coming out, and the teacher constantly telling us to not upgrade to it and to remain on 8, as 8.1 didn't really work for some reason.
In 1996, I was only 16 years old and on my first job I was deploying computer labs for elementary schools using the Buddy B-200 by a company called Austin and using software by Applica. It was only for one more user (no audio), but it did have the multiuser experience in a Windows 95 environment. Pretty amazing stuff, and not only for 3rd world countries. Computers were very expensive on those days so this made a lot of sense. Why fit a lab with 20 computers when you can do it with 10?
I just edited and uploaded a 1080p60 video on my 2008 MacBook Pro, so the people complaining about not being able to watch 60fps video on a 12-year-old PC need to replace it with a 13-year-old Mac!
UA-cam is probably forcing VP9 onto them (bandwidth costs) and the folks complaining are likely not using an extension to force back AVC/H264. That would likely fix it for them too if there’s any hardware acceleration. I had a 2007 or 2008 regular MacBook and the integrated Intel graphics were not good at video decoding (480p or 720p H264 depending on complexity and frame rate IIRC). But I can imagine the discrete chip in your similar vintage Pro is handling H264 with total ease.
Dude, people complaining about not being able to watch 60fps video on a 12-year-old PC need to know, that they configured it to be nice for 1024x768. HD was a thing, that they did not pay extra for. I use 70usd 13" elitebook laptop with i7, manufactured in 2012. Bought it last year while prices skyrocketed (still, ridiculously cheap) and it is perfectly capable of multi monitor 1080p 60fps on integrated gpu. Few years back on standalone GPU it would be fine too
I upgraded to SSD and from 4GiB to 12GiB of ram tho, but now over hundred of chrome cards and older, not graphically heavy games are fine, with VM of Win XP in background too :>
Oh shit, I think my old elementary school used to use these (2006-2009 ish). They were strung out on a row in our library. I remember there being like 8-10 of these. Always wondered how they could "get a computer to be so small" as a kid. Thanks for the memories.
It does sound like the company put work in to get visibility among institutes of learning. One of those old Linux forums CRD put up in this video posts mentions a publicity coup where they set up a whole school with a few machines. Especially at the time, I imagine this excited many school-lab-responsible types greatly.
Actually it was possible to fit some 3D capabilities to a single FPGA even in 2005 - I did my master degree on this topic. Also in 2005 there were custom FPGA based 3D graphic solutions - for example to render voxel based graphics (for example results of MRI scans) but they used more then a single FPGA chip. From practical point of view - it would be too expensive at that time eliminating any sense of such device.
Oh man this was so good. With my admittedly limited experience with video production and editing, even I was able to appreciate how much time and effort went into this. The raw facts and info. is staggering without feeling arbitrary or the runtime feeling bloated. I was locked in from start to finish. Left a like, thank you for the free hour of entertainment and education. 👍✌️
I'd like to see this pushed to its limits using the latest motherboards that still have PCI. Considering it has Linux support there is a lot of potential for cool stuff
@@prla5400 enword you don't need real support from the company, it comes from that the kernel likely already knows how to use the hardware off the rip. Why you jumping in with nothing to say samjeer?
Interesting, but I'm at a loss as to why you kept asserting that Windows "didn't support" multiuser. Windows (NT) has supported multiple users on multiple windowstations containing multiple desktops since 3.51 at least. The problem has been that there was no HARDWARE that took advantage of it until NComputing and no SOFTWARE until Terminal Services. But the OS had the support the entire time. In fact, you could be running the POSIX subsystem (or WSL2 today) on a process in one windowstation, OS/2 in another, and Windows in a third. They all coexist and multiple users can use multiple windowstations and multiple subsystems at the same time. You can see this because Task Manager for NT4 enumerates all window stations, then desktops, then windows. This is why apps running in an NComputing session work at all, and why they are visible in Task Manager along with the correctly attributed session. I don't recall if I even had a WindowStation column available in NT4, but the OS sure had it. Both NComputing's solution and Windows Terminal Server are mechanisms that allow you to ADD a windowstation, which you can think of as where your mouse and keyboard and display are. The operating system itself, not unlike *NIX, has supported it since inception. Put most simply, two monitors for the same user is one windowstation (multiple monitors, same desktop or separate). Two monitors assigned to different window stations is multiuser, and always has been. It really comes down to the fact the NComputing made good use of facilities already present in the operating system - they didn't "add" them.
STELLAR video as always! This is a benchmark for how deep dive technology videos on UA-cam should be done! Also, I love how simultaneously clean and bonkers this solution is, especially the software side of things
The "DRM" with the serial numbers is likely some early, "locker lock" security - You wouldn't want just anyone hooking up a terminal to your computer and having access to your hardware.
so weird I watched the whole video instead of typical UA-cam click and skip. I learn something. and the fact the CEO responded in the comment is wild.. subbed
I'm watching this on Phenom FX 8530, 16GB RAM from 2013, later added GPU GT-1030 for 4K decoding and NVME SSD for storage. It's unbelievable how good this PC works for its age.
Yeah, I'm running an I5-4690k and AMD R9 RX280, both from 2014 and I don't see a need for a newer hardware for at least the next 5 years. As I only play single player games a few times a year, I'd only consider upgrading the GPU for a few generations up if GTA6 ever releases lol Otherwise it's totally adequate for everything on the web.
i'm watching this on a 2008 Thinkpad 400, Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, but also I miss my Phenom II, I don't have it anymore but that thing lasted me several years. Outside of cutting edge gaming it took a long time to feel old.
It started with your video on the Ryobi soldering iron (which I'm actually considering getting). Now, I have watched just about every one of your videos -- and some twice over. Great production quality, great content, and great channel!
You did an excellent job! I don't like long videos, but as an old IT guy I was captivated in the first 10 minutes. Around 2010 I came across a tiny little dll file that turned my Windows XP Pro machine into an XP terminal server for up to 10 concurrent users. You had to have other machines already, but if you did not have the money for a terminal server, this would do the trick. To me, it sounds like x300 boxes are essentially the reverse of a KVM switch. If I remember correctly, when XP was first in beta testing they said something about supporting 9 monitors (think Brady Bunch), so it makes sense to me how they were able to get 7 desktop sessions. Very cool though!
Third random video I've seen in my feed of yours, third one that is an hour plus long. Watched each one all the way through. Keep it up sir! I enjoy your content and subscribed!
man this was a fascinating piece of hardware. Also really loved the discussion on "the Plateau." Make me wonder what the world would have looked like if the Plateau had been embraced, and the global mission was to make hardware last as long as feasibly possible (We'd still have many homes with PCs from the late 90s bopping around I'd be willing to bet)
Been waiting for this! How delightfully bizarre. I helped build a few computer labs when I taught high school and each one was $60k for 40ish machines. Getting that funding literally took years- I can see why this was a viable option in a lot of cases.
Man that number is so wild but it makes sense. Everything is so expensive, and it feels like prior to the 2010s with these robust refurb programs from Dell and HP (maybe they were around before, I just never heard about them back then maybe) there was very little mitigation to make used machines practical for organizations. So much waste.
One of the smaller chips on the card is probably a Serial EEPROM that contains the code for the FPGA. Additionally the multi-desktop stuff was *almost* native in Windows at that point. -- You could definitely do this over RDP in 2007. (i.e. multiple users having separate isolated Windows sessions on the same box without CALs -- up to two users at once IIRC. -- There was a registry key you could set if you needed more than two users IIRC.) As for legal issues with Windows -- as long as you own the license, it was fine -- MS audited orgs all the time back in the day -- and we only ever had to provide a count of the licenses owned versus what was required; they didn't even differentiate between versions -- need another license for '95? -- they'll sell you a license for XP and call it good -- So, saying "the end user is required to own a license" was fine, that's how it was enforced. No reason for MS to go after the hardware manufacturer. There is an additional licensing issue though -- in that you are sharing the same programs -- like two users using one copy of Word or Photoshop, etc. -- but that's even a more obscure issue. -- Again though -- the audit process was probably similar for Adobe as it was for MS -- if you wanted to be "legal" you just bought more licenses -- doesn't matter what the computer is doing, if in an audit you can prove you own X numbers of the software and you're using X numbers, then you passed the audit. -- Though Adobe and Macromedia usually gave the software away to schools and students for free (and/or heavily discounted) anyway -- gotta get 'em hooked while they're young and all that. Multi-point server stuck around after 2016 -- IIRC it became a SAS offering in 2019~ish? -- Basically it's cloud based now, because you can cram a lot more compute into a data center, and it's just cheaper and easier for customers to deploy.
Well done! Thank you for that video. I was one of the people who recommended nComputing to a school, where it solved their problem. Very few people ever take my recommendations, so I felt validated when I saw your video. And yes, the limitation is in the software. I'm one of those old guys who, back in the day, ran multi-user UNIX/Xenix systems on machines that would be laughably under-powered by today's standards. I could never understand how people got suckered into using Windows in the first place. I did also run a business network of 30 Dell Optiplex PCs with 166MHz Pentium CPUs with 32MB RAM and a 2GB HD, for 10 years from 1998 to 2008 on Windows95, so yeah, I'm a bit stubborn. In the end, I did convert those PCs to thin clients running Linux and rdesktop connecting to a Windows 2000 Terminal Server. I'm well aware that even the Pentium CPU could never reach 100% running just normal office applications. Those PCs would start swapping long before the CPU even broke a sweat. I did a lot of experimentation with multi-user systems, hacked versions of Windows, etc. WindowsXP _can_ be made into a multi-user system with some hacks. Even Windows10 can be made multi-user and I know a business that is running it that way for over 3 years now, as their main system. Users connect via Remmina from Linux systems, so they get the "best" of both worlds.
My best guess regarding Quake only running two instances at a time is that they're probably queueing up waiting for an available CPU thread before starting. Would be interesting to see if you could run more than two on a CPU with more than 2 threads.
Quake (and sequels) pretty much required a dedicated server for fairness to attached clients. If you ran a "listen server," as it was called when running client and server on the same PC, that PC was the only one that had a good time. In 1998 or so, my buddy and I set up an NT Pentium (later Linux with dual Celerons) box for just that purpose (Quake 2) and hosted it on the dial-up ISP that we worked at (with the permission of the higher-ups, of course - it was kind of a claim to fame, actually). It hosted 8 clients with ease. It probably could have done more but we liked the gaming dynamics of 8 players better than say, 16.
Great example of the internet being responsible for our constant upgrading. I love the basic UI and functionality of older versions of windows, but the power and tech requirements of the modern internet / browser experience forces you to upgrade. Even XP is forced off the net by not having a new enough browser available. Back around 02 I remember still being able to kind of function on the internet with IE 5? Or 5.5? On windows 3.1, but many new pages wouldn't work. Similar to the winXP example now.
You can squeeze a couple more years from old hardware by just installing Linux. But having a lighter OS and a modern browser can only get you so far. Modern web is getting increasingly bloated and even basic (from a "social" standpoint, not necessarily from the computational one) sites like UA-cam or Facebook can really struggle on underpowered hardware.
I wish I could have Windows 2000 back .... secure for its time (NT based) no wasted resources on eye candy, nothing comes with it so bring only the software you need.
there are VERY few channels that i will rewatch videos, but i have to say yours are always just as good the second (or third) time around! Thank you for all your AMAZING work man!
My mind is blown by your effort to reverse engineer the thing, and by the crew who made it work. Must have had some people straight from microsoft to pull it off. The OS integration seems deep and beautifully made. Really well made, nevermind the limitations
39:30 - My bet is that the Hsync and Vsync are combined on the same wire (and could possibly all be lumped in as sync-on-green, but it didn't look like the green was tapped for this), and then the remaining two wires would be something like: usb data, I2C data, generic clock-and-data, etc. Hard to stuff all of those things into a single line. In addition, I see two little traces on the top side coming off the CPLD towards the VGA port - since I doubt they actually implemented DDC (since the device only supports two modes anyway), this is likely the Hsync and Vsync, which fits. I suppose they could even have the data synced to the VGA clock, so they have two data pins and a clock...
I would be tempted to fit the audio into the h sync area on the video signals. You already have an analog channel, put it in there. Also if you multiply the number of lines by the refresh rate (thus finding the number of h blanks per second) you get almost the same number for (1024x) 768x60 and (800x) 600x75. And the number is about 45KHz. So if you have an analog sample and hold circuit in there on red and blue (left and right) and open the gate at the right moment during the horizontal flyback you can reproduce audio at about 45KHz, which would sound pretty good. Merging the audio onto the R and B and the sync on to the G would save you a lot of lines. It would either use up 4 or 6 lines (6 for differential, which technically you should use for twisted pair CAT cable). For what it maters I firmly believe the design supports only a single rate of lines (h sync rate) and that is why we see no 60Hz option. A 60Hz output would have to run at about 94Hz vertical refresh rate to get to the required horizontal refresh rate. And I'm not sure how many cheap monitors would support that back then. And if you had to use expensive monitors then it would hurt the monetary advantages of the system.
So much effort just to avoid having to find a different connector with more pins... :) But I guess it's easier said than done, especially when UTP has twisted pairs which probably helped suppress interference a bit.
one could argue that the computer is running just one user session at a time, like the user switching allows, but switching very very fast, like every other cpu cycle, hence not breaking the EULA
Incredible video! I didn't check the runtime before watching but ended up sitting through the entire thing because you packed so much information in. Great job :D
You say "worse UI" and you might be right from a power user perspective, but from a casual person perspective the Ribbon design language has made it a lot easier for a lot more people to access Office's more advanced functions. The addition of a search bar was huge too. Instead of needing to know where Excel's data validation tools are users can just type in "data validation" and the options appear. They just need to know what a feature is called to find it. I do consider myself a power user of the office suite, I use visual basic, and macros, and lots of technical features, but I have seen how easy it is for my tech-illiterate coworkers to get way more out of office than they ever would have before, with the new designs. If you trained on the 95-2003 era, the ribbon-era looks terrible. If you're untrained working in the ribbon-era you're doing stuff that needed training in the 95-2003 era.
Heres some comments as I watch the video.... License - The stations are very dumb. They could be copied by other companies so the license was for the software. I think it worked out to be about $150 per station device, for a $20 manufacturing cost. It was all in the software. You could buy the cards separate from the station units. [remove redundant stuff you explained about terminal services] You could hack windows xp pro by re-writing a DLL to increase the license count and have multiple users logged in at the same time like terminal services on a windows server OS. You just didnt have the security stuff that windows server offered. NComputing simply created a bunch of virtual hardware and then hacked around the TS license limit by replacing some dlls. Not sure if it was legal or they reverse engineered etc. They then piped each session to the virtual hardware on the pci card. I am not sure how legal this was. The PCI card then sent the video/keyboard/audio out the cat5 cable to the station device. Most of the stuff you mention such as the USB redirection, video graphic settings etc you could also configure in microsoft terminal services / RDP too. The RDP protocol also wouldnt do the on-the-fly resolution changing at the time. The stations are dumb to the point where they dont do any processing inside them. They are just a converter from some RJ45 cable to the breakout of the various devices. I am almost certain that everything is done in software piggybacking on the terminal services component of windows and the PCI card is just an encoder/decoder that converts the device input/output data into 3x cat5 cables- like some sort of multiplexer. Then the station is just the decoder or reverse of that. Everything else would be done in software. You can tell by running a video encode on a pentium 4 without hyperthreading and notice how laggy the other stations can become when doing things like surfing the internet in IE6 Interesting thing - the new zealand inland revenue website used to be quite processor intensive on IE6 when on a terminal server and so if one user went there it would become laggy for other users on both a terminal server and ncomputing stations. We sold these to a few accountants offices but gave up when one user would start watching youtube and other users couldnt work smoothly with their accounting software. When selling this to schools, we would have to sell the school multiple copies of windows so they could keep the extra copies on hand if they were ever audited. This is probably why I think your pricing quotes are a bit too cheap. We used to have to consider licensing audits whenever we sold these to be extra safe rather than sorry. Limited bandwidth in a cat5 cable for analog video is what I think was the main factor that the only really usable resolution was 1024x768 Windows XP had terrible support for multicore processors. We used to always sell them with a pentium 4 with hyperthreading.
Did you notice how terrible the sound came through the stations? definitley sounded like compressed wave or 22khz - not CD quality 44.1khz
Sim city slowing down - I think its definitley a graphics thing. The RDP protocol was designed to be incredibly bandwidth efficient. Its not like a compressed mpeg video. It can take parts of the screen, break it down, cache images in the client. SO say your minimising and maximizing an accounting program. When you restore the program the second time, it can take parts of the screen and say "this area is the same as before, just show that again" rather than resending another copy of the image. But it goes further and looks at the elements that make up the application interface and layer them so it might say draw a bunch of images to some parts of the screen Eg. (title bar with blue color fade for the win2k theme). Then inside in the middle it might decide to draw a grey box, and then send some text across it and it gets all this info from deep within the windows environment as windows itself is creating the content on screen. You can imagine this is much more bandwidth efficient than just sending frames of pictures. And it makes using word 97 though an RDP session via a 56k dialup modem incredibly easy and usable. But its also very processor intensive as it needs to decide what parts of the screen it will send as images, what parts to send as text or drawing commands. Vectoring is probably a better way to describe it. In adobe you can create an image by inserting a jpeg photo object which might be stored as a raster, put a circle next to it which is just stored as a circle command (draw circle from point A to B) rather than storing all the bitmap raster data of the circle. (explaing for others, not CRD) So sim city presents an interesting conundrum. Its going to be almost a full screen image because its hard to break down into parts as it wont be using many large areas of solid colors and plain windows fonts. Which it has to capture in software, create a png (or whatever optionally lossless image compression the rdp protocol uses) and send that for every frame. This is why video through RDP was almost impossible at the time - 3 frames a second though now they have optimised in recent versions of windows server and it can break down the frame and send a video stream object with vector objects and images around it to make up the full screen. Many games however can be broken down into smaller images that often repeat, and only the parts of the screen that move are sent as frame updates. But sim city has a lot of animation spread out across the screen, even when the user is idle - not just in focused areas, so its harder to break down into smaller objects for frame updates. It then has to process each of these frames and look for optimization opportunities which it probably wont find much. So what I am saying is the frame analysis is what slows it down, not necessarily the processing done by the application itself. You will probably notice the graphics becomes laggy with applications where lots of the screen is changing between frames, and it works much better with applications where much of the screen is static.
Think about word for example. Using an RDP session over a slow network or laggy internet connection - click the file menu. It might slightly lag as the terminal services engine decides the icons are each going to be sent as images, while the rest might be a grey box with some text on top to make up the total part of the screen that the file menu now occupies. The second time you click the file menu, it just says "Oh after computing all that again the result is the same as what i sent you previously so just show xyz again". It still had to do all the initial computation to work out the result can be just a cached image command. Then the only other updates are the cursor as you move around the screen - nothing really bandwidth intensive.
Terminal services was the reason I became a network tech. I love the technology. Hence why I jumped on this the moment it became available and started selling it to schools.
In the 1980's we were running as many as 32 terminals on 386 machines running Xenix or Unix using smart serial cards to offload the I/O load. (I used to design them)
thats what I thought too. An AS/400 e.g. was able to lift the workload of a whole company and he is fxxxking around with games in a 2 user environment...
Just think of how many terminals a modern eight core laptop could support… or a threadripper 🤣 The hard part would be finding the users who wanted to use your terminal…
When I was starting out at a telco (Telstra Aus) I remember seeing quite a few Olivetti box's that ran unix and talked to a pile of serial terminals. Back then setting up an office with multiple terminals meant running heaps of RS232 serial cables back to a 'server', everything was text based. I actually think more work got done back then, as the users couldn't stuff around with the computer, it was setup to do what it did and that was that. When we went to PC's, we then had to employ a pile of extra support (IT) people to go around finding lost icons and resetting screen resolutions etc, that users would stuff about with and break their workflows. One twit discovered laplink and would clone one machine to another because he thought the other looked better, of course he broke several machines, as the hardware did not match - wrong driver issues deluxe.
I've been binging your content today, I love these long-form in-depth videos on these things, I find it endlessly fascinating as its the hardware I grew up on. I see we really didn't need two computers at home back then. Just a couple moniors and keyboards and me and my sister could've done our homework ect at the same time. this could've saved families lots of money really. cool channel, I like your content - its exactly the kind of thing that interests me.
33:34 It's actually possible to get Starcraft to boot and run in 800x600 or other custom resolutions. It's the same old editing a config or variables file trick that was pretty common of the era, would be interesting to see whether that actually got it to boot or not or whether there's some other issue there
Well, you also boot into windows, and virtually every game that was "windows compatible" in 1995-1998 area was really just running did, so would argue that "booting" would still apply.
@@lilsammywasapunkrock , because it was just running did? The operating system starts itself. It is not started by anything else. It pulls itself up by it's own bootstrap. That is what booting means.
@@hunterlong1820 , you might say that. It seems a bit beside the point of the distinction between what the machine does to get the operating system running automatically and a person telling it to launch a program afterward. To me, the meaning of boot is pretty clear and easy to understand--in spite of not being familiar with the term boot straps. lol
So cool. I remember about 10 to 13 years ago finding a modified version of RDP that would allow more than one person to login at the same time. I'm sure this runs in a similar fashion. Great video...
It is extremely rare for me to find myself totally absorbed by a video these days, but I must congratulate you on this wonderful production. I think that maybe in part it struck home as I have actually owned an Ncomputing setup which I (unsuccessfully) attempted to get running with Linux. Thank you :)
I recently set up gpu-p in hyper-v for multi user gaming, so seeing this setup with pentium 4s was incredibly interesting. Thanks for putting in the effort!
27:29 anti-counterfeiting. Ghost shifts and cloning were a problem even back then, and one way to combat it was (and still is) to have the software refuse to operate if it can't authenticate the hardware. There are more elaborate ways to do this but something as simple as an obscured rule for what makes a valid serial number can often be enough to stop a shady manufacturer from outright cloning your product--as often they don't even bother putting unique serial numbers on their counterfeit units.
Yea but, that’s because who we build the web for has grown immensely since 2005 and due to this things have gotten way more complicated . Back in the day you just needed to make an English website that worked passably on an 800x600 desktop. Now, when you make a website you need to make sure it works for 1920x1080 Desktop and mobile and everywhere in between and this is just a simple example. A lot of features that were relatively simple back in 2005 (or stuff you didn’t even need to think about back then) have gotten a lot more complicated. Accessibility, security, internalization all have gotten way more complicated since 2005.
Darn. I got so distracted reading the book you wrote and the calculations you made about the money you earned (and laughed at the miscalculation) that I had to move back in time a couple of times.... Thanks for the informative but mostly entertaining video!
Fascinating. Having worked with CPM86 for PCs where you could run multiple dumb terminals from a serial port expander on PCs and RTC86 that allowed 24 dumb terminals from Microchannel serial adapters in a PS2 Model 80 or Model 95. In reality you would use some ports for printers in a print server type queuing system but to see a room full of agents with Wyse 120 monitors all taking bookings all powered from one PC, and then seeing that PC running modems and printers at the same time does, as you said, prove that most PCs are way more powerful than users actually ever need, with exceptions.
In 2011, I had used this setup in a C programming class, but it was a bit different and ethernet controlled using a LAN switch and a Xeon Workstation CPU. The system had 15 -18 terminals set up. The virtualization using a cheap FPGA is really impressive. Wonderful content. Cheers ✨✨
Sometimes when I watch your essays, I wish that I WASNT into tech and retro tech. Because I’d like to test my theory that I’d still enjoy your videos if I knew nothing of what you spoke. You have a way with your words, very easy for anybody to follow along with. I’m sure I’m not the only person that clicks one of your videos, realized about 10 minutes in that I watched that video already 6 months ago. But even still I just stay! Keep up the good work. Speaking to people is your calling
The later modules were at my school, we used them as a cheap computer lab. We had like 30 of those things hooked up to one pc and we all managed pretty well just using a web browser and word processor.
You do a good show not just this one. UA-cam took me here. Long ...i thought...ok lets try....an hour later im still impressed...no bs lots of info. Love how you develop the episodes...nice work
Speaking from my personal experience Aster has been fantastic. Ran it for years and years. Best way to multiseat on one graphics card from what I could find.
I actually ran into this sort of system in production! In middle school, we had a few small labs in the english classrooms where they had a single, central Core2Quad machine with plenty of RAM, and on each side 3 workstations running off of these zero clients. They were neat, but if you knew what you were doing, you got the central seat if you could... It's also interesting to note that, much of the time, these organizations that used these had full AD implementations as well -- in many cases it was not just loading 7 profiles at once from the disk, it was sometimes *creating* profiles for fresh logon credentials.
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There was an issue in the server 2003 terminal services audio stack where if you were running a bunch of concurrent audio streams it would get confused on where it was directing the audio and send little snippets of audio to the wrong seat. The terminal services environment I was running had upwards of 60 concurrent thin clients connected and there was always a few people listening to streaming audio, and one guy who REALLY liked watching porn at work. So almost every day when people were using them while listening to music there would be these tiny blips of audio of women moaning cutting in. Got fixed with 2008, I assume by properly threading the audio processing rather than whatever the hell they were doing in 2003.
pinned. Breathtakingly hilarious.
it people have best/worst job
It's not threading in the computer sense, just containing the entire runtime audio status in a process or driver that's confined to a "session" (which for processes is a process grouping that can be shown as a task manager column, for drivers is the virtual address range from 0xA0000000 to 0xBFFFFFFF being shared among all processes in that terminal but no others, and for in-memory named objects is an NT native name space directory like \Sessions\3).
The windows shared audio stack has always been notoriously shit.
That's why any sound card worth a damn has an ASIO driver and just skips the stack all together.
Mac OS's Core Audio is so much better than the Windows Sound Stack will ever be.
I would have to say that Microsoft Teams' handling of audio devices is reminiscent of this.
Hello from founder of NComputing. Awesome video to remind me the days we made this model. X300 and its successor models (X350, X550) had sold to school computer labs in US and many developing countries at the same time (over 3 million seats!!!). Many countries' Dept of Education had selected this platform to save the budget and give more internet access to kids. All these models are no longer installable to latest computer since X-series used standard PCI slot (today's computer has PCI Express slot not old PCI slot). NComputing is producing newer model, MX100s (using standard ethernet plug) which leverages NComputing's SoC ARM chip (Numo Chip) instead of FPGA. (we made our own SoC). Or really cool new product that uses Raspberry Pi board called RX-series. Back in the day, NComputing and Microsoft had agreed and promoted this platform to use with Microsoft Server OS only to be compliant with EULA, but we saw consumer techie users attempted to use with Desktop OS which worked well too. We don't recommend to use such a way though. NComputing is now 19 years old, we keep providing thin client computing including hardware and also software such as LeafOS (you can freely download and use it for your old PC to repurpose), VERDE VDI (affordable enterprise VDI like Citrix, VMware) so on. My last advice is .... please do not buy X300, X350, X550 model in the market if you see, these are already 12-15 years old one, and you can not install to old or new PC no matter. (also don't try counterfeit or clones Chinese products). AGAIN, THANK YOU for our 5 million devices users since 2003. We commit to keep developing disruptive end user computing solution in cloud era. Please try "RX420(RDP)" and "LeafOS".
This looks like it was a great product and thanks for commenting. I hope this post moves closer to the top.
Was he correct about the theory of operation?
Computers are cool
Be careful around Microsoft it's not the same company it was 10 years ago it's run by people obsessed with stock prices going up and everything else doesn't matter.
I ran a couple of computer labs in a very poor school district here in Texas about twelve years ago using an off the shelf gaming computer (because I could order it with extra memory) and an ncomputing setup.
It was about the only way we could do it (my yearly budget before grants or begging for additonal funds was only about 4k for the district). It wasnt perfect but it got more students online.
yeah we've betwin software to do that.
Another fantastic deep dive into obscurity! The amount of time this obviously took to make is, well. I get anxious just thinking about it. Superb work. Loved the analogy of Pentium 4 freight engines being used to sharpen pencils.
This reinvigorates my plans to dive into the Buddy B-210 system a viewer sent in a while back, which promises to do the same thing - only using a 100MHz Pentium 1 with 32MB RAM on Windows 95. Ha. Granted it's only two virtual desktops, but still.
Thanks man! In re that buddy - my money says it's a single board computer, w95 is a bit too sophisticated for any funky TSR context switching nonsense I feel, but I'd be very interested to see if I'm right.
@@CathodeRayDude Oh hey! I can't tell you about the Buddy B-210, but the B-200 was basically a Cirrus Logic graphics chip ISA card with some software to make all the magic happen. I can tell you for sure there wasn't a computer in there, but to this date I am not sure how they managed to make it all work.
I can tell you that it was very finicky and delicate, at least with their early drivers/software.
@@SpyAlelo outstanding! That sounds fascinating then. Maybe after @LGR is done with it, if the modus operandi isn't apparent I can take a stab at working it frontwards to back.
@@CathodeRayDude That would be great! That was a very long time ago, but if you have questions or hit a blocker reach out to me. I'll share what I remember.
I came to the comment to mention what I remembered as the “Buddy PC” but LGR said it first and has even got one. I look forward to seeing you put it to the test. My memory is that it pretty much worked but with annoying glitches.
This gentleman has a very excellent delivery system: Clear speach, intelligent smooth transition dialog, pleasant voice and enthusiasm. First class integrated graphics.
He does otherwise quarter of a million viewers would not be watching a video that does a deep dive on a device that has zero impact in your computing today. I mean it's pointless, not like you were thinking about going and getting one of these devices. I guess there is some nostalgia if you are old enough to remember this era in computing so that has some charm to it, but I think it's his delivery that keeps people tuned in, it sounds like he is a gifted individual. I am sure just like in anything you practice you can improve speech delivery and keeping an audience engaged is something you can get better with practice, but no doubt for some people int's a gift that they are born with, something that happens naturally and in my opinion this gentleman is one of those gifted individuals who can keep you engaged and listening about something that is completely pointless today. If I were this guy, I would have 5 girlfriends, a wife and I would audition for some type of news casting role or hosting a tv show, I would even recommend he makes some UA-cam videos.
Thank-you for your thoughts. Truly, I am old enough to remember before micros were invented, where we had to hard code on mainframes. Best wishes, Cordially microuser@@SavageThrone
I've never seen your channel, and I can't recall having seen any of your videos before.. but for some reason UA-cam suggested this video for me. I'm positively captivated by the entire video. Awesome subject, beautifully presented, with amazing detail and research. You've earned a subscriber, on the basis of this single video, on an esoteric piece of tech I never have, and never will own. Keep up the awesome!
Same here.
Definitely, same here never heard of this gentleman (I'M assuming he's a MAN)....Issss that oooook? "Society's issue not mine (NOT A DIG AT HIM!)or channel but I find older tech nostalgia video's fascinating (I grew up in the super late 80's/90's got my 1st IBM clone a Fancy Dancy Packard Bell for Christmas of 92 with a 48MHZ Intel CPU and a 400 Megabyte Hard-Drive and tore it down 2 days after I got it BOY.....was my father PISSED OFF but put it back perfectly and led me down the road of computers/ IT something that year started doing basic Hard-Drive replacements Ram upgrades proprietary ISA Slot cards Power supply etc.. He'd even have to Fib and say he or his 20 year old son was doing it not that his untrained learned on the fly 7-8 year old son....lolthat I've done all my life after & currently working in computer / IT fields my father always says that was the cheapest trade school education he's ever seen but strange/unknown working odd Technologies that can be put together to solve odd business problems in oddly wonderful crazy ways LOVE A CHALLENGE ! I'LL BE GOING DOWN A RABBIT HOLE THIS EVENING! KEEP IT UP!
Same here. Praise the algorithm. Lol
Same 😆
Yep, that's the whole idea of the "suggestions" feature; other stuff we enjoy, that also happens to keep us watching the 'Tube.
I, too, am happy that UA-cam figured that since I like Technology Connections, Video Game Historian (I'm guessing here), and I don't know, maybe the visual style of Prophet of Zod? Therefore, I would probably like Cathode Ray Dude... Whatever the algorithmic impetus, it's right on, and I do, indeed!
Cool video! I was the founder/CEO of a company that ended up acquired by 2X/Parallels, that created a 'Citrix' like product (basically, remote sessions for users using multi-session OSs like Windows Server 2003. 2008 and so on back in the day). You are correct that even according to Microsoft, at the time, they did accept this as 'legal' if you had all the XP licenses for every person connecting to this (I heard this from them directly and even had emails confirming it). Also note that with Windows XP SP2 BETA, multi-user RDP was possible. It was later removed from the final SP2 build and that is how many people implemented multi-user RDP on XP, by simply using the required files off the BETA SP2. Really awesome video here, bringing so many great memories about the early days of remote desktop.
About the Plateau: Ive been saying for many years putting an SSD into an old machine often completely revives it, in terms of usability for some people.
The processing power might actually be there, but its the storage medium speeds that are holding things back. I know my father still uses his 2011 Thinkpad, I used the same model for years, with only the main reason for upgrading was that my mother wanted a laptop for when she doesn't feel like sitting at her desk, and I wanted something more light weight. I didn't need that much of a processor speed upgrade, since I use my desktop for most things.
New SSD (only cost me 35 bucks) plus maxing out the RAM made a huge difference on this laptop a few years ago. I went from 4gigs to 16. The difference was almost as big as when I switched from Win7 to Linux. 4 gigs of RAM in windows and it used to crash and need restarted all the time. 4 gigs of RAM in linux and it would just periodically get stuck for a bit and start working again. Now with 16 gigs it never gets stuck.
Many years. 12 years for me. Laptops are utterly useless with spinning platters. No innovation = profits
@@godsinbox
Tbh mechanical drives are actually a terrible design idea in portable devices, cause anything mechanical in nature hates vibrations, and portable things by their very nature are exposed to a lot of vibrations. Imo the beat thing for laptops would be to have an eeprom to hold the system files, and an ssd to hold data. That way you don't need to wait for the disk to initiate to be able to boot the base system.
Funny you mention thinkpad specifically. I just ordered a new $380 HP laptop yesterday, but almost went for a ten year old TP for $120. I may still get that one too, put in some extra ram and an ssd.
@@peppigue
Look and see if you can flash coreboot or libreboot on it too, I know thinkpads are well supported.
In Brazil ncomputing made a huge success, here the models didn´t have host card, and worked using common network, and yes, in the begining used modified files of rdp to work, and a lot of windows updates break it, and you have to wait the new version ofncomputing "driver". Here microsoft get to sue companies that used, alleging piracy and because that.. sales droped, and ncomputing changed the sales pich changed to use servers and rdc licences, or xenserver. sorry for my bad english.
Makes perfect sense if N Computing had their customers sign a disclaimer that said “we have the licenses to do this”.
They reduced their liability enough that Microsoft didn’t bother suing them.
Your English is way better that my Portuguese that’s for sure!
Well that makes sense. I just could not believe that Microsoft was standing by and did nothing about this. Shame it was a bit scummier approach than what CRD thought of. I guess they made more money by suing individual companies that used this product than by suing the company that made it, lol
The way you usually can get the code from an fpga is that its actually not stored on the fpga, its stored on an SPI flash chip in 99% of cases. You can’t just read the code universally because every fpga manufacturer and series has a different bitstream, but there are quite a few bitstreams that have been reverse engineered and have been made open-source, with software able to turn the bitstream into verilog in order to verify that the stream has been copied correctly
That commentary about how if you only do one task you can keep the same old PC for decades is why I actually went to university with a 1999 iBook to take notes in classes.... in 2017
Back in 02 I took a 486 laptop to college for my typing, programming, and web publishing courses!
The instructor laughed at me, I was like hey, it does everything I need for class! The class laughed too. It was almost 2" thick (Dell xpi)
yep, used an X20 (2002) in 2016 as well, now I have an X220 (2012) I still use almost daily. I just got an L412 (2010) from the trash bin at work as a workbench PC. It's just for looking up datasheets, some programming, interfacing with measuring equipment and some graphing/data handling. For these applications you really don't need a lot of power, hell every USB device, that I'm currently using it with, would work with a USB 1.1 port as well.
I was using an early P3 based celeron laptop in the early 2010s. I even took it online some.
With a laptop it's lifetime is pretty much tied to the battery. When that dies, you're unlikely to find new old stock that isn't also dead.
the clamshell?
No way! Those things were so cool
I’d love a follow-up video where you push this to it’s limit. Something like a first-gen Core i7 with matching motherboard, that has 2 PCI slots and running on a SATA SSD.
I second this notion. You could go even further and run it on modern hardware with a PICe to 2x PCI extender, like the "Sintech PCI-E Express X1 to Dual PCI Riser Extender Card." In which case the bottleneck will end up being 4GB of RAM I would guess..
It is interesting to see this being used on such limited machines. Cranking the CPU and mobo to what this could theoretically support would be pretty neat, though probably not enough for a full video.
This is exactly what I want to see!
If you REALLY want to push it maybe a dual cpu workstation. All the cores…
See my main comment :)
I'm from an country in development and we had these. They used to run 6 machines from one tower with windows XP. By the time i was graduating they updgraded the systems to 4 machines per tower with windows 7. I remember we used to make fake desktop shortcuts that would run a shutdown command that would turn off the tower. Good times. Thanks for remind me of this.
I remember when i told my parents about it they tried to get one for our house since we only had 1 pc for a bunch of kids.
I wish I had this at home. We could not afford 2 PC, but I was not aware this tech existed.
from with country you are??
In america, I was in a similar situation. We had an old tower with an old GPU, and were able to run some games. Cannot remember the computer specs, just that it was better than my 2015 laptop I got a year after we got the desktop, which had a 1.6ghz dual core, 4gb ram, and a hdd. Was able to play a cracked version of Subnautica v2828, which had about 11-21 fps... these ncomputing things could have helped us, as the one desktop could be used for schoolwork, and we had 6 kids needing it at times... would have saved a bunch of money we didnt have, instead of buying laptops every other year.
I got a free copy of Office 97 once because the teacher at Tennessee Technology Center tried to copy the Office disc onto a CD-RW to install on all the class computers and protect the original but the drives in a lot of the first generation pentium machines couldn't read the -RW disc. She threw it away and I fished it out of the trash and took it home and it worked fine on our home PC :)
Someone donated an Office 97 upgrade version disc to my school, and I vividly remember installing MS Works 5.0 on every single PC and then using the upgrade disk to install Office 97 on each of them. Good times.
@@kreuner11 one of the teachers at my school used scandisk to make sure that any disks kids brought from home didn't have viruses on them..
It's been quite a while, but I remember being able to get past Office 97's license screen with just filling it with ones ( "1111111111" ). I think I figured that out one day because I couldn't find it, got frustrated, and randomly tried it. I might be misremembering, but I do remember ambivalently feeling like both a genius and an idiot.
@@streetroller1000that would be windows 95, office 97 you can use 1112- then ones iirc
looool
Excellent work! This hour flew by!
Seconded. It was like an archeology dig where you're wondering what secret explains things.
i am half way and i come to read coments and i am like "wtf is this a hour long?" and hell i have not seen the time fly LoL
it took me three sittings, i have little person demanding attention, but well worth it.
Yes
It's like some other universe that you didn't know was part of this universe
I work at a University and we used the NComputing X300 in one of our labs for a while as part of a “green computing” initiative. Students needed to use USB drives, so we had USB extension cables and assigned a USB port to each station as you described. However, it would sometimes crash when people inserted their USB drives. It wasn’t fun to see four stations go down while people were using them during finals, but I guess we were pushing the limits.
Fun fact: terminal services/remote desktop is still being used for a variety of unexpected things. For instance, extreme sandboxing of web browsers (run the browser tab in a very limited account and remote it into the main session), and WSL graphics (runs a Wayland server in Linux that exposes itself as a very fancy RDC server). (Source: interestingly, the WSLg blog post)
Someones been keeping up with the news
@@jacobhinchliffe6659 I mean, I also work with somebody who helped on the WSLg project... I don't regularly read the Windows blog 😁
Took a 3 years computer/electronic course in 2010, then on a field trip we went to a university where they were making a lot of studies with several components, like new CPU cooldown systems, etc, etc, a professor there started asking us which course we were taking, which profession we would love to follow, and when she knew what we were studying she immediately told us that we had no future, because the future wasn't refurbishing, but throw out and buy new, pretty sad as that actually got stuck in my head and the next years seeing how the industry was going through the route she said, made me just step back from this area completely.
I'm glad that currently the industry is being pushed to a refurbish mindset instead of a throw out buy new.
The push towards refurbish is probably due to resource problems and costs getting too high to keep consumers interested.
Saddest thing nowadays is that it is the software industry that is making everything they can to keep the throw out and buy new model hanging on. Software vendors - most painfully with the proprietary software for a proprietary services where end user has no alternatives - keep pushing forced updates with completely unnecessary requirements for HW resources and new OS versions which are also more and more bloated, and in worst cases, such as with mobile devices, HW-proprietary. Vast majority of today's software is a pile of crap with more and more bloat, less and less useful functionality, and more and more horrible UIs.
That's great for the environment!
@@TheSimoc I'm reminded of how Halo 2 was 'Vista Only'. even tho its a Dx9 Game. ..WTF? Yeah, it was an Artificial limit imposed by the Installer. Razor1911 seen to THAT with their nice 'boot-loader' - I had Halo 2 running on WinXP-sp2 back in what, 2006? Just goes to show what power we keep voting away. 80s corporate-law nonsense & the Dark Age of Information.
Damn that professor is a complete suckered, though kind of right about our ridiculous culture on excessive consumerism. Fixing the old, upgrading the current is the way to go if we want too keep living on this planet. And it's fun and cheap sometimes.
After watching the crazy Sony Style camcorder laptop video, I was hooked. This video is the next one I'm watching but far from the last!
I have a feeling Microsoft saw how this was actually being used and took the same kind of stance we've seen adobe take. The exposure to windows over macintosh was more important than the lost license sales to schools and institutions that probably would have pirated windows anyhow.
Yea, going after a company catering mostly to poor institutions or developing countries would have probably gained them no extra license sales, less exposure to windows, extra legal work and potentially bad PR. Imagine some news outlet getting wind of this and running a headline along the lines of "Microsoft is preventing schools from making affordable computer labs!". As the video says, it's all about the money, and there probably wasn't any in shutting down NComputing. Now, if they were going after the big business market, it would have been a very different story.
I remember being in Catholic school in 2001. The computer lab consisted of 35 PCs, all with the same copy of Windows 98, and I'm pretty sure we 'borrowed' that license key from someone else.
@@AriosFireFeathers Plus if schools buy a site licence from Microsoft, it comes as a schools agreement which is normally based on how many staff/students they have, not how many machines they run. So it doesn't matter to Microsoft if it was 1 machine to a student or 1 machine between 7, they got paid the same and the exposure to their software was higher. This may have been a factor in N Computing not advertising to home or business markets, but focusing on schools.
@@PeterGrant Plenty of businesses used enterprise licenses to run hundreds of computers on a single license, as you got a roll of stickers with it, linked back to the original, and so long as you used the same supplier for your IT, you got the license essentially free.
Same now with Win10/11 enterprise, you have a virtual XP machine you can use, which has a separate license for it, generated by the enterprise machine for it. Done because so many things will only run on XP, so wrapping it in a more secure supported OS is better, though even that embedded XP copy does get it's own updates, as MS still provides extended support to paying customers, like the DOD.
I'm from a 3rd world country and I remembered that I talked once with the IT head of my city and he told me that when windows 7 was released they called the him to talk about upgrading all the city computers(public school computer labs and more) from XP to 7 but because it was a few hundred of computers they didn't had then budget and the salesman tried to sell with EOL of windows XP and more, in the end of the talk the MSFT rep asked what they would do when XP went EOL, he said that he doesn't know but probably use alternative solutions.
Because there was a lot of machines on computer labs at public schools, after a few weeks they got free licenses upgrade for every machine.
Each of your videos improves on itself, every time. This feels like a full on lecture that I would happily attend at a computing seminar but it's even better, because I got to attend it from home, in 4K 60!
Is your life not in 4k 60 ? Probably from a PAL region
I saw this product at CES in 2007. I immediately came home and ordered it just to demo it. Just as you said it works perfect for basic tasks. We tried to suggest it to a few clients but nobody was interested or could understand it. And I’m just sitting on a shelf for years. But definitely an interesting product. Glad to see you made a video about it.
Honestly dude, this was one of the most interesting PC videos on UA-cam in at least two years for me! Kick ass, dude, I hope you are putting out more of this.
A Sandy Bridge machine upgraded to 16GB of RAM and an SSD *is* The Plateau. It helps having some sort of discrete GPU but it's not totally necessary.
I'm running a 3570K with 16GB of RAM and a 1050TI. I won't need to replace the thing for years to come. I program, run many VM's and occasionally game. And since I'm a happy Linux user it won't ever be artificially obsoleted.
True even 8gb ram is enough for most tasks, having still a great experience, that's the SATA SSDs starting from 2016 that become the game changers
@@fabiosemino2214 If Limited SSD Write Endurance wasn't a thing I'd totally agree with you. It's best to have the maximum ram your machine will take / you can reasonably afford to keep from ruining the SSD with eleventy trillion pagefile writes.
I replaced my 3770k machine not because I needed to (was super snappy till the day I decommissioned it), but purely because I wanted to. Sandy/Ivy Bridge will likely survive the heat death of the universe.
@@mrflamewars indeed, or if your use case allows it using Linux works well, my parents small power rig basically is turned on 24/7 and its Samsung 840 it's basically almost a quarter of it's project writes life with about 6 to 12 gb ram during it's lifespan
A few years ago, where I worked, we had a video editing lab with standard definition broadcast quality capture cards (DPS Perception). They supported Premiere, but also offered their own video editing system which some of our users preferred. This software only ran on machines with Perception capture cards, but required a dongle as well, because, of course a £5,000 video capture card isn't enough of a dongle.
Yeah, my 1.2 ghz Athlon-A lasted from May 2000 to January 2007 - almost seven years. It eventually sucked for gaming with my ATI Radeon and could not keep up with Doom 3 / Half Life 2.
Hey it's chocolate rain man
Athlon X2 here :p Cheers
You're the last person I would expect under this video lmao
Even Tay was on the AMD train lol
Yeah, I eventually realized that whenever your pc starts feeling slow for games it’s usually better to just get a good graphics card instead of updating the whole pc. I was able to keep a late 2006 model Mac Pro from 2007 to 2016 by updating the graphics card around 2014 or so. (To be fair this was a pretty good machine back in the day and I did install a different graphics card in it shortly after getting the machine)
"In the last 20 years I've been hard pressed to figure out what Microsoft is adding in each release, other than a much worse UI."
That's the modern business plan for everyone, isn't it? I think it's called "software as a service".
You didn't understand. User interface, not way of distribution.
Meanwhile I'm laughing while using GNU / FOSS software that gets better and more useable over time, I'm actually learning to use Garuda Dragonized Linux on my laptop before installing it on my desktop too.
The constant bloat and increasingly locked down useableility is annoying enough with W10, and now Windows 11 is looking a *Lot* like Windows 8 mark 2 trying to be a tablet OS again and I hated that more than enough the first time.
So yeah, a weird little Linux / Windows tangent, love the video, what a wacky little hardware/software setup for setting up a computer lab
@@UNSCPILOT I have the exact opposite experience regarding FOSS software. It seems to me that in the late 90's early 2000's, you would find a free alternative for everything you wanted. Nowadays, almost all of these so called free software have some sort of pricing and licensing scheme behind them if you want to use the fully featured version.
dont get me wrong, i dont mind devs wanting to get paid, but i dont feel like this "FOSS" community really still exists.
@@raycharles1752 I have to wonder what programs you're using. The bread-and-butter of the Linux World productivity software has been totally free for a long time, and looks like it always will be. I'm talking about LibreOffice and gimp. Sure, if you want to use enterprise software, you will be paying accordingly, but I've never seen any of the standard desktop applications adopting a freemium model.
Wait till they add micro transactions to Michealsoft Orifice.
I grew up in an incredibly poor town in Texas and we had these in our computer lab. This was around 2010 and I was in high school. We had Pentium 4 machines (yes, in 2010) split out to 4 or 5 stations each.
Was working for an engineering college in 2010
Pentium 4 machines were still in wide use in 2010 that’s completely normal. People still use core 2 duo with windows 10/11 on them to this day.
@@9852323agreed, I was given a Pentium 4 desktop by the IT guy of my mums job that was upgrading at the time.
XP (while in beta) did briefly allow for multiple users to be using a single computer (one locally and one remotely) with separate desktops, but the released version didn't allow that. You could for a while, replace one of the files in the released version with the file from the beta and regain the functionality. I'm guessing that this company made use of a hacked version of that.
Exactly. its a simple change in the Terminal services to allow this to work on pretty much any version of windows.
still alive, i'm using it.
This is amazing. Nothing like a knowledgable nerd with the energy to make something high effort. Thank you for this. I've been in computing for over 20 years and didn't know this existed. Thanks for going so deep, thanks for being such a great communicator, thanks for making something so accessible and explaining it so well.
Amazing video, man. Super fascinating and you're so good at explaining stuff. Loving your channel. You're up there with LGR and Techmoan and Technology Connections!
I've noticed many years ago, when I found my uncle was still using the computer I helped him buy years previous, that old computers are still just fine *if* you use the period software as well.
If you're not being forced into updates and an ever more bloated system partition, the computer can just keep doing what it's been doing.
Yes. Unfortunately many very same or at least functionally same kind of services on the web, and not to mentioned proprietary-application ones, have replaced their websites, supported apps, and protocols into new ones which do not work on old omputers anymore, and almost always are unnecessarily more bloated and less useful than their former versions.
Except you become very vulnerable to viruses and exploits especially if you connect to the internet in any form.
About two years ago I helped out a friends uncle, they had gotten a new Laptop and wanted me to help set it up and transfer over all of the photos from the old PC. The old PC was still running Windows XP and was never connected to the Internet. They had Internet and wifi with the ISP router but the PC was not connected, only their smartphones were.
So I first wanted to look at the old PC and start the file transfer (in hindsight this was the best idea of that whole endeavor, that thing hat USB 2 only) onto a USB device. So we turned the PC on and it took forever (this was a budget machine from the discounter, probably from when XP was still new), the thing here was, I was getting restless, not to say distressed, while for him this was normal (at this point the laptop was still unopened in the box, as to be able to return it, should I say it's utter garbage). Meanwhile I was used to the OS and all daily used programs being loaded instantly from an SSD but he was totally calm, for him this PC was still the fastest a PC was...he used it the same as the day he'd gotten it. Needless to say he was blown away by the laptop.
That's wholesome.
I still have a Dell laptop running XP that I keep only because there is one program that cannot run on later models. I only need it once or twice a year.
My old public school had (and probably still has) these in each classroom, I always wondered how they were putting 4 virtual machines on a Core 2 Duo.
Yep, I was a tech aide for the IT dept at my high school at the time these released and we basically used them as a cheaper way to replace a buncha badly aging Pentium III machines in our main computer lab. They actually worked quite well, though we had to lock away the main PCs on each row after some kids quickly discovered they could sabotage 4 of their peers work by force power cycling their own PC lol
@@olddrunkninja that was something I was curious about. Since the host PC is basically controlling every session, you can't really make that into a student device without some jenky lockout i'd imagine.
My trade school had this setup 20 users on a server using the Ncomputering termals and there was one setup reserved that was for the IT personal. He was surprized that I tried to use task manger and figure what that pc specs are and all the 20 user were using internet. The video playback is tearing bad.
core 2 duo is no slouch.
@@camthesaxman3387 re: "core 2 duo is no slouch."
True that. BIG improvement over the Pentium series .... stilling running C2D here on a 2008 Dell Optiplex ... and Win Xp to boot! Using Mypal browser 'cuz nothing else works tho ...
Awesome video. I lived through these days of the PC and you're exactly right. Thanks for a trip down memory lane. You've got a great presentation style. Subscribed after this video - my first from your channel.
Yeah, so referencing the whole licencing debacle. I'm like 99% sure Microsoft would basically have just asked the owners of this device if audited, to buy each "client" a licence and called it a day. at the end of the day, they make money only on the software licenses, not hardware. I work for IT in a medium sized company that has been audited by Microsoft, and as long as you have as many licences as are really being "used" they pretty much just give you a pass against weird use cases like this. if you don't have the licences, you have a grace period to obtain said licenses in order to be compliant.
You're totally right btw about terminal services, what you said makes 100% complete sense. and for "Lab" use I have hacked the Terminal Services to allow regular windows to log in multiple clients via mstsc. they are almost certainly doing that too.
I did that audit, and turns out we actually had more Windows 98 packs than machines, because a few of the ones installed had been upgraded to use as servers, so had a NT license on them instead. I was building them assembly line, so the first drive was simply cloned onto the rest, with the installer halted at the first reboot, which is where it asks for the key. All the install files were stored in a directory, along with the installer (thanks MS for putting all the cabinets in one place along with setup.exe) so the clones simply had the key entered after starting for the first time, and carried on from there. All the drivers for the various parts, motherboard, processor, network card, display, keyboard, mouse, were all in that directory as well, so just a case of pressing enter a half dozen times after that to get a desktop. Unopened pack went in the case, just in case it was needed at some time.
When somebody asked for a disk I would simply give them one from the pile, but not the COA, as you can remove the disk and COA without actually opening the shrink pack.
Later on XP upgrades were done using hardware changes, to get the cheap copy, so there were a lot of new printer cables bought, along with a few new keyboards and mice, to trigger the hardware change thing. Good number of those cables went to the recycler still in the bag, never used.
@@SeanBZA
waaay back in the day i remember getting caught by the "your hardware has changed you need a new key" thing on XP a few times, usually calling the hotline would resolve it without buying anything
XP's licensing was always a bit mental, there were so many caveats with OEM keys / retail discs etc etc, thankfully Nlite strips it out for retro gaming purposes, install from Nlite version of XP, stick random XP COA to machine and off you go.
Win 7 / 8 / 10 are really pleasant by comparison, installing win10 but only have a win7 COA?, windows installer doesnt care!
Also remember that Edu sector often has other prices and options. I work with Office 365 and the edu prices are either free or way lower than business licenses.
Also, schools. MS would have been more lax about schools, for entirely selfish reasons. Firstly because of the bad PR that comes from taking legal action against a sector seen as working to the public good - about the only that would hurt their reputation more than suing a school would be suing a hospital. And secondly because schools are training up future Windows and Office users - if the school can't afford Windows, they might be desperate enough to even try linux, as terrible as that was back then. MS would rather people just pirate windows than see that happen.
Astounding. No virtualization, no docker, no kubernetes, efficient hardware usage in 2004. Are there any solutions like that today? Instead of relying on server farms you can split your computational power
Now any reasonably modern PC could do all of this with virtual machines pretty easily. You would just need some way to allocate input devices and displays to specific VMs and you could probably do it with of the shelf hardware.
@@thesledgehammerblog overhead on that us obscien
winconnect does the job.
@@akimbofurry2179 Only because Windows is chonky. In the general case it was a viable tactic in *1972*.
My work desktop runs Ubuntu and KVM to host 2 Windows 10 VMs. I RDP to those Win10 VMs from my laptop, no matter where I'm at (remote, in the data center, or sitting at my desk). We have a "budget" VDI for contractors to remote into that has the same setup, but with 3 Windows 10 VMs. I could easily run 5 Windows 10 VMs on this same mid-tier desktop system.
I experimented with ncomputing tech back in that era and we deployed thousands of their l300 units in our warehouses (they call them zero clients). They are still deployed to this day and work great. As I see you’ve realized, ncomputing is still around and innovating. They are heavy into the vdi space. Glad you found their x300, I have one somewhere as well as an exemplar of all their other client tech from that time.
Those FPGAs (at least that old) have no internal non-volatile storage of their own, so the configuration data is almost always loaded from a little flash chip next to it on power-up. That flash chip would be easy to dump, but best I can tell there's nothing you can do with that. Unless you're insanely skilled and have a LOT of time, or you're the chip manufacturer. That's because it's basically going into one huge shift register inside the chip that configures all the stuff in there, and there's no public or easily-discoverable info on how the bit stream maps to the internal layout. Also often the whole thing is encrypted. You'd be way better off just reverse-engineering the functionality from the outside.
That's kind of what I figured. You know, I didn't look up the chip that I called a ram chip, now that I think about it, I wonder if it's possible that this thing just RAMDACs directly out of system memory, and that chip is actually a PROM.
@@CathodeRayDude Nah that's a RAM chip for sure, Samsung K4S something. FPGAs do have some memory cells that can be used for small RAM or cache but typically a design with any kind of complexity will want some larger external RAM to operate. That doesn't necessarily mean it's acting as video RAM, but it probably is in this case.
The flash chip, if there is one, would be a small 8-pin chip or something like that. I don't actually see one though, so maybe it's actually being configured over PCI by the driver! Does it take a few extra seconds to become active after booting?
@@kasamikona yup, it doesn't output anything unless the "bus enumerator" driver is installed, so perhaps they rolled in the firmware push to that. That makes more sense compared to what I remembered about how fpgas worked at this time
@@CathodeRayDude That's a rather neat way of doing that to be honest, keeping costs down. The CPLD programming is non-volatile so it can happily sit there waiting for that configuration data to blast at the FPGA (around 1.2Mbit max for this chip by the way), no onboard flash needed. Also a "firmware update" could come for free just by updating the driver.
There are some Flash-based FPGA where you can leave the bitstream installed in the chip (I think the Spartan 3f variant for example) but I think they were more expensive and maybe slower?
I'm a lot younger, and was in elementary in 2010s. I can still remember the school using ncomputing. It was pretty cool, as you could send messages from computer to computer and do all sorts of things. I remember windows 8.1 coming out, and the teacher constantly telling us to not upgrade to it and to remain on 8, as 8.1 didn't really work for some reason.
This hardware+software is incredible. I'd never heard of it before now, and this video is thoroughly delightful - thanks!
In 1996, I was only 16 years old and on my first job I was deploying computer labs for elementary schools using the Buddy B-200 by a company called Austin and using software by Applica. It was only for one more user (no audio), but it did have the multiuser experience in a Windows 95 environment.
Pretty amazing stuff, and not only for 3rd world countries. Computers were very expensive on those days so this made a lot of sense.
Why fit a lab with 20 computers when you can do it with 10?
I just edited and uploaded a 1080p60 video on my 2008 MacBook Pro, so the people complaining about not being able to watch 60fps video on a 12-year-old PC need to replace it with a 13-year-old Mac!
UA-cam is probably forcing VP9 onto them (bandwidth costs) and the folks complaining are likely not using an extension to force back AVC/H264. That would likely fix it for them too if there’s any hardware acceleration.
I had a 2007 or 2008 regular MacBook and the integrated Intel graphics were not good at video decoding (480p or 720p H264 depending on complexity and frame rate IIRC). But I can imagine the discrete chip in your similar vintage Pro is handling H264 with total ease.
I thought he said 4k 60fps and youtube doesnt create a 1080p 60fps stream that they can watch?
How much RAM are you running on the MBP
Dude, people complaining about not being able to watch 60fps video on a 12-year-old PC need to know, that they configured it to be nice for 1024x768. HD was a thing, that they did not pay extra for. I use 70usd 13" elitebook laptop with i7, manufactured in 2012. Bought it last year while prices skyrocketed (still, ridiculously cheap) and it is perfectly capable of multi monitor 1080p 60fps on integrated gpu. Few years back on standalone GPU it would be fine too
I upgraded to SSD and from 4GiB to 12GiB of ram tho, but now over hundred of chrome cards and older, not graphically heavy games are fine, with VM of Win XP in background too :>
Oh shit, I think my old elementary school used to use these (2006-2009 ish). They were strung out on a row in our library. I remember there being like 8-10 of these. Always wondered how they could "get a computer to be so small" as a kid. Thanks for the memories.
It does sound like the company put work in to get visibility among institutes of learning. One of those old Linux forums CRD put up in this video posts mentions a publicity coup where they set up a whole school with a few machines. Especially at the time, I imagine this excited many school-lab-responsible types greatly.
Actually it was possible to fit some 3D capabilities to a single FPGA even in 2005 - I did my master degree on this topic. Also in 2005 there were custom FPGA based 3D graphic solutions - for example to render voxel based graphics (for example results of MRI scans) but they used more then a single FPGA chip. From practical point of view - it would be too expensive at that time eliminating any sense of such device.
Oh man this was so good. With my admittedly limited experience with video production and editing, even I was able to appreciate how much time and effort went into this. The raw facts and info. is staggering without feeling arbitrary or the runtime feeling bloated. I was locked in from start to finish. Left a like, thank you for the free hour of entertainment and education. 👍✌️
Dude this is the first time watching you. Great job! I'm amazed by your quality in speech and articulation. Definitely earned my sub!
I really enjoyed seeing six of them up on the screens, that was delightful.
And heck yeah I wanna see more like this. This is really cool stuff.
legitimately one of the coolest things ive seen all year, i kinda really want to get one and get a openTTD lan party going
Blown away by the awesome content. Thank you for putting in this incredible effort.
I'd like to see this pushed to its limits using the latest motherboards that still have PCI. Considering it has Linux support there is a lot of potential for cool stuff
I do know firsthand that theres 10th gen intel with pci, i wouldnt doubt that theres 12th gen and whatever contemporary ryzen were on
Linux is already really easy to do multi user on, though?
No real support for Linux, as it says in the video. I guess if I didn't miss anything
@@prla5400 enword you don't need real support from the company, it comes from that the kernel likely already knows how to use the hardware off the rip. Why you jumping in with nothing to say samjeer?
Oh man yea, it would be a dream to see how well this performed on a 3rd gen Ryzen with an NVMe SSD, hahah. Would be hauling
The dedication to the effects and editing is amazing, like how the words are obstructed by the TV at 55:11. Love it lol
The wall is painted for chroma key/greenscreen effects. Its how he did the various flags as well. Pretty smart!
Interesting, but I'm at a loss as to why you kept asserting that Windows "didn't support" multiuser. Windows (NT) has supported multiple users on multiple windowstations containing multiple desktops since 3.51 at least. The problem has been that there was no HARDWARE that took advantage of it until NComputing and no SOFTWARE until Terminal Services. But the OS had the support the entire time.
In fact, you could be running the POSIX subsystem (or WSL2 today) on a process in one windowstation, OS/2 in another, and Windows in a third. They all coexist and multiple users can use multiple windowstations and multiple subsystems at the same time.
You can see this because Task Manager for NT4 enumerates all window stations, then desktops, then windows. This is why apps running in an NComputing session work at all, and why they are visible in Task Manager along with the correctly attributed session. I don't recall if I even had a WindowStation column available in NT4, but the OS sure had it.
Both NComputing's solution and Windows Terminal Server are mechanisms that allow you to ADD a windowstation, which you can think of as where your mouse and keyboard and display are. The operating system itself, not unlike *NIX, has supported it since inception.
Put most simply, two monitors for the same user is one windowstation (multiple monitors, same desktop or separate). Two monitors assigned to different window stations is multiuser, and always has been.
It really comes down to the fact the NComputing made good use of facilities already present in the operating system - they didn't "add" them.
Oh wow Dave's garage! Nice to see you here.
STELLAR video as always! This is a benchmark for how deep dive technology videos on UA-cam should be done! Also, I love how simultaneously clean and bonkers this solution is, especially the software side of things
The "DRM" with the serial numbers is likely some early, "locker lock" security - You wouldn't want just anyone hooking up a terminal to your computer and having access to your hardware.
so weird I watched the whole video instead of typical UA-cam click and skip. I learn something. and the fact the CEO responded in the comment is wild.. subbed
I'm watching this on Phenom FX 8530, 16GB RAM from 2013, later added GPU GT-1030 for 4K decoding and NVME SSD for storage. It's unbelievable how good this PC works for its age.
Switched from HD to SSD .... suddenly my 10 year old (Gaming Laptop) is cool again, despite Windows 10.
Yeah, I'm running an I5-4690k and AMD R9 RX280, both from 2014 and I don't see a need for a newer hardware for at least the next 5 years. As I only play single player games a few times a year, I'd only consider upgrading the GPU for a few generations up if GTA6 ever releases lol
Otherwise it's totally adequate for everything on the web.
@@Renee_R343 here with fx8350 and r9 280x too, all the same thoughts
i'm watching this on a 2008 Thinkpad 400, Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, but also I miss my Phenom II, I don't have it anymore but that thing lasted me several years. Outside of cutting edge gaming it took a long time to feel old.
That is super impressive technology, especially the 6 concurrent users running apps at the same time with a single core non hyperthreaded machine.
It started with your video on the Ryobi soldering iron (which I'm actually considering getting). Now, I have watched just about every one of your videos -- and some twice over. Great production quality, great content, and great channel!
And holy cow has the production skyrocketed!!!! Proud of how far this channel has come and how far you are gonna go.
You did an excellent job! I don't like long videos, but as an old IT guy I was captivated in the first 10 minutes. Around 2010 I came across a tiny little dll file that turned my Windows XP Pro machine into an XP terminal server for up to 10 concurrent users. You had to have other machines already, but if you did not have the money for a terminal server, this would do the trick. To me, it sounds like x300 boxes are essentially the reverse of a KVM switch. If I remember correctly, when XP was first in beta testing they said something about supporting 9 monitors (think Brady Bunch), so it makes sense to me how they were able to get 7 desktop sessions. Very cool though!
Hi Vinnie! I am curious what was that dll file? Can you share it, or type it's name? I would like to look into that file.
Third random video I've seen in my feed of yours, third one that is an hour plus long. Watched each one all the way through. Keep it up sir! I enjoy your content and subscribed!
man this was a fascinating piece of hardware. Also really loved the discussion on "the Plateau." Make me wonder what the world would have looked like if the Plateau had been embraced, and the global mission was to make hardware last as long as feasibly possible (We'd still have many homes with PCs from the late 90s bopping around I'd be willing to bet)
Been waiting for this! How delightfully bizarre. I helped build a few computer labs when I taught high school and each one was $60k for 40ish machines. Getting that funding literally took years- I can see why this was a viable option in a lot of cases.
Man that number is so wild but it makes sense. Everything is so expensive, and it feels like prior to the 2010s with these robust refurb programs from Dell and HP (maybe they were around before, I just never heard about them back then maybe) there was very little mitigation to make used machines practical for organizations. So much waste.
One of the smaller chips on the card is probably a Serial EEPROM that contains the code for the FPGA.
Additionally the multi-desktop stuff was *almost* native in Windows at that point. -- You could definitely do this over RDP in 2007. (i.e. multiple users having separate isolated Windows sessions on the same box without CALs -- up to two users at once IIRC. -- There was a registry key you could set if you needed more than two users IIRC.)
As for legal issues with Windows -- as long as you own the license, it was fine -- MS audited orgs all the time back in the day -- and we only ever had to provide a count of the licenses owned versus what was required; they didn't even differentiate between versions -- need another license for '95? -- they'll sell you a license for XP and call it good -- So, saying "the end user is required to own a license" was fine, that's how it was enforced. No reason for MS to go after the hardware manufacturer.
There is an additional licensing issue though -- in that you are sharing the same programs -- like two users using one copy of Word or Photoshop, etc. -- but that's even a more obscure issue. -- Again though -- the audit process was probably similar for Adobe as it was for MS -- if you wanted to be "legal" you just bought more licenses -- doesn't matter what the computer is doing, if in an audit you can prove you own X numbers of the software and you're using X numbers, then you passed the audit. -- Though Adobe and Macromedia usually gave the software away to schools and students for free (and/or heavily discounted) anyway -- gotta get 'em hooked while they're young and all that.
Multi-point server stuck around after 2016 -- IIRC it became a SAS offering in 2019~ish? -- Basically it's cloud based now, because you can cram a lot more compute into a data center, and it's just cheaper and easier for customers to deploy.
Well done!
Thank you for that video.
I was one of the people who recommended nComputing to a school, where it solved their problem. Very few people ever take my recommendations, so I felt validated when I saw your video.
And yes, the limitation is in the software.
I'm one of those old guys who, back in the day, ran multi-user UNIX/Xenix systems on machines that would be laughably under-powered by today's standards. I could never understand how people got suckered into using Windows in the first place.
I did also run a business network of 30 Dell Optiplex PCs with 166MHz Pentium CPUs with 32MB RAM and a 2GB HD, for 10 years from 1998 to 2008 on Windows95, so yeah, I'm a bit stubborn. In the end, I did convert those PCs to thin clients running Linux and rdesktop connecting to a Windows 2000 Terminal Server.
I'm well aware that even the Pentium CPU could never reach 100% running just normal office applications. Those PCs would start swapping long before the CPU even broke a sweat.
I did a lot of experimentation with multi-user systems, hacked versions of Windows, etc. WindowsXP _can_ be made into a multi-user system with some hacks. Even Windows10 can be made multi-user and I know a business that is running it that way for over 3 years now, as their main system. Users connect via Remmina from Linux systems, so they get the "best" of both worlds.
My best guess regarding Quake only running two instances at a time is that they're probably queueing up waiting for an available CPU thread before starting. Would be interesting to see if you could run more than two on a CPU with more than 2 threads.
Quake (and sequels) pretty much required a dedicated server for fairness to attached clients. If you ran a "listen server," as it was called when running client and server on the same PC, that PC was the only one that had a good time. In 1998 or so, my buddy and I set up an NT Pentium (later Linux with dual Celerons) box for just that purpose (Quake 2) and hosted it on the dial-up ISP that we worked at (with the permission of the higher-ups, of course - it was kind of a claim to fame, actually). It hosted 8 clients with ease. It probably could have done more but we liked the gaming dynamics of 8 players better than say, 16.
Fantastic video, very interesting. Hopefully by now you have one video per alternative product 😁
Great example of the internet being responsible for our constant upgrading.
I love the basic UI and functionality of older versions of windows, but the power and tech requirements of the modern internet / browser experience forces you to upgrade. Even XP is forced off the net by not having a new enough browser available.
Back around 02 I remember still being able to kind of function on the internet with IE 5? Or 5.5? On windows 3.1, but many new pages wouldn't work. Similar to the winXP example now.
You can squeeze a couple more years from old hardware by just installing Linux.
But having a lighter OS and a modern browser can only get you so far. Modern web is getting increasingly bloated and even basic (from a "social" standpoint, not necessarily from the computational one) sites like UA-cam or Facebook can really struggle on underpowered hardware.
I wish I could have Windows 2000 back .... secure for its time (NT based) no wasted resources on eye candy, nothing comes with it so bring only the software you need.
XP is so riddled with security holes, the modern internet being too powerful for it is probably a good thing
Well, you can get pretty far with first adblockers and then JS blockers.
(and ditching windows bcs any secure version will lag as hell)
@Green Mamba Games Yes my first Linux box was a 90MHZ Slot 1 Pentium, with 128M of RAM, deemed too slow to run XP, but fairly screamed with RH4.0.
there are VERY few channels that i will rewatch videos, but i have to say yours are always just as good the second (or third) time around!
Thank you for all your AMAZING work man!
My mind is blown by your effort to reverse engineer the thing, and by the crew who made it work. Must have had some people straight from microsoft to pull it off. The OS integration seems deep and beautifully made. Really well made, nevermind the limitations
You knocked it out of the park with this one, dude. Keep it up! You're the first youtuber in a looong time that I will actually support with my money.
39:30 - My bet is that the Hsync and Vsync are combined on the same wire (and could possibly all be lumped in as sync-on-green, but it didn't look like the green was tapped for this), and then the remaining two wires would be something like: usb data, I2C data, generic clock-and-data, etc. Hard to stuff all of those things into a single line. In addition, I see two little traces on the top side coming off the CPLD towards the VGA port - since I doubt they actually implemented DDC (since the device only supports two modes anyway), this is likely the Hsync and Vsync, which fits.
I suppose they could even have the data synced to the VGA clock, so they have two data pins and a clock...
I would be tempted to fit the audio into the h sync area on the video signals. You already have an analog channel, put it in there. Also if you multiply the number of lines by the refresh rate (thus finding the number of h blanks per second) you get almost the same number for (1024x) 768x60 and (800x) 600x75. And the number is about 45KHz. So if you have an analog sample and hold circuit in there on red and blue (left and right) and open the gate at the right moment during the horizontal flyback you can reproduce audio at about 45KHz, which would sound pretty good.
Merging the audio onto the R and B and the sync on to the G would save you a lot of lines. It would either use up 4 or 6 lines (6 for differential, which technically you should use for twisted pair CAT cable).
For what it maters I firmly believe the design supports only a single rate of lines (h sync rate) and that is why we see no 60Hz option. A 60Hz output would have to run at about 94Hz vertical refresh rate to get to the required horizontal refresh rate. And I'm not sure how many cheap monitors would support that back then. And if you had to use expensive monitors then it would hurt the monetary advantages of the system.
So much effort just to avoid having to find a different connector with more pins... :) But I guess it's easier said than done, especially when UTP has twisted pairs which probably helped suppress interference a bit.
I want to like this twice. This was a fantastic dive into something rare and unique that I didn't actually know! Thank you!
one could argue that the computer is running just one user session at a time, like the user switching allows, but switching very very fast, like every other cpu cycle, hence not breaking the EULA
For single core, but what about multicore?
@@rollinkendal8130 true now, but back then the pentium 4 had only 1 core, and 2 threads, with luck!!
Clever arguments are lost on dumb judges.
Incredible video! I didn't check the runtime before watching but ended up sitting through the entire thing because you packed so much information in. Great job :D
You say "worse UI" and you might be right from a power user perspective, but from a casual person perspective the Ribbon design language has made it a lot easier for a lot more people to access Office's more advanced functions. The addition of a search bar was huge too. Instead of needing to know where Excel's data validation tools are users can just type in "data validation" and the options appear. They just need to know what a feature is called to find it. I do consider myself a power user of the office suite, I use visual basic, and macros, and lots of technical features, but I have seen how easy it is for my tech-illiterate coworkers to get way more out of office than they ever would have before, with the new designs. If you trained on the 95-2003 era, the ribbon-era looks terrible. If you're untrained working in the ribbon-era you're doing stuff that needed training in the 95-2003 era.
Heres some comments as I watch the video....
License
- The stations are very dumb. They could be copied by other companies so the license was for the software. I think it worked out to be about $150 per station device, for a $20 manufacturing cost. It was all in the software.
You could buy the cards separate from the station units.
[remove redundant stuff you explained about terminal services]
You could hack windows xp pro by re-writing a DLL to increase the license count and have multiple users logged in at the same time like terminal services on a windows server OS. You just didnt have the security stuff that windows server offered.
NComputing simply created a bunch of virtual hardware and then hacked around the TS license limit by replacing some dlls. Not sure if it was legal or they reverse engineered etc. They then piped each session to the virtual hardware on the pci card. I am not sure how legal this was.
The PCI card then sent the video/keyboard/audio out the cat5 cable to the station device.
Most of the stuff you mention such as the USB redirection, video graphic settings etc you could also configure in microsoft terminal services / RDP too. The RDP protocol also wouldnt do the on-the-fly resolution changing at the time.
The stations are dumb to the point where they dont do any processing inside them. They are just a converter from some RJ45 cable to the breakout of the various devices. I am almost certain that everything is done in software piggybacking on the terminal services component of windows and the PCI card is just an encoder/decoder that converts the device input/output data into 3x cat5 cables- like some sort of multiplexer. Then the station is just the decoder or reverse of that.
Everything else would be done in software. You can tell by running a video encode on a pentium 4 without hyperthreading and notice how laggy the other stations can become when doing things like surfing the internet in IE6
Interesting thing - the new zealand inland revenue website used to be quite processor intensive on IE6 when on a terminal server and so if one user went there it would become laggy for other users on both a terminal server and ncomputing stations. We sold these to a few accountants offices but gave up when one user would start watching youtube and other users couldnt work smoothly with their accounting software.
When selling this to schools, we would have to sell the school multiple copies of windows so they could keep the extra copies on hand if they were ever audited. This is probably why I think your pricing quotes are a bit too cheap. We used to have to consider licensing audits whenever we sold these to be extra safe rather than sorry.
Limited bandwidth in a cat5 cable for analog video is what I think was the main factor that the only really usable resolution was 1024x768
Windows XP had terrible support for multicore processors. We used to always sell them with a pentium 4 with hyperthreading.
Did you notice how terrible the sound came through the stations? definitley sounded like compressed wave or 22khz - not CD quality 44.1khz
Sim city slowing down - I think its definitley a graphics thing.
The RDP protocol was designed to be incredibly bandwidth efficient. Its not like a compressed mpeg video. It can take parts of the screen, break it down, cache images in the client.
SO say your minimising and maximizing an accounting program. When you restore the program the second time, it can take parts of the screen and say "this area is the same as before, just show that again" rather than resending another copy of the image. But it goes further and looks at the elements that make up the application interface and layer them so it might say draw a bunch of images to some parts of the screen Eg. (title bar with blue color fade for the win2k theme).
Then inside in the middle it might decide to draw a grey box, and then send some text across it and it gets all this info from deep within the windows environment as windows itself is creating the content on screen.
You can imagine this is much more bandwidth efficient than just sending frames of pictures. And it makes using word 97 though an RDP session via a 56k dialup modem incredibly easy and usable.
But its also very processor intensive as it needs to decide what parts of the screen it will send as images, what parts to send as text or drawing commands. Vectoring is probably a better way to describe it.
In adobe you can create an image by inserting a jpeg photo object which might be stored as a raster, put a circle next to it which is just stored as a circle command (draw circle from point A to B) rather than storing all the bitmap raster data of the circle. (explaing for others, not CRD)
So sim city presents an interesting conundrum. Its going to be almost a full screen image because its hard to break down into parts as it wont be using many large areas of solid colors and plain windows fonts.
Which it has to capture in software, create a png (or whatever optionally lossless image compression the rdp protocol uses) and send that for every frame.
This is why video through RDP was almost impossible at the time - 3 frames a second though now they have optimised in recent versions of windows server and it can break down the frame and send a video stream object with vector objects and images around it to make up the full screen.
Many games however can be broken down into smaller images that often repeat, and only the parts of the screen that move are sent as frame updates. But sim city has a lot of animation spread out across the screen, even when the user is idle - not just in focused areas, so its harder to break down into smaller objects for frame updates.
It then has to process each of these frames and look for optimization opportunities which it probably wont find much.
So what I am saying is the frame analysis is what slows it down, not necessarily the processing done by the application itself.
You will probably notice the graphics becomes laggy with applications where lots of the screen is changing between frames, and it works much better with applications where much of the screen is static.
Think about word for example. Using an RDP session over a slow network or laggy internet connection - click the file menu. It might slightly lag as the terminal services engine decides the icons are each going to be sent as images, while the rest might be a grey box with some text on top to make up the total part of the screen that the file menu now occupies.
The second time you click the file menu, it just says "Oh after computing all that again the result is the same as what i sent you previously so just show xyz again".
It still had to do all the initial computation to work out the result can be just a cached image command.
Then the only other updates are the cursor as you move around the screen - nothing really bandwidth intensive.
Terminal services was the reason I became a network tech. I love the technology. Hence why I jumped on this the moment it became available and started selling it to schools.
About the RDP - how would you explain then showing up as 3x graphic cards without software installed?
Just read this comment if you don't want to watch an hour long video. Neat topic, neat analysis, desperately needs a tldr.
In the 1980's we were running as many as 32 terminals on 386 machines running Xenix or Unix using smart serial cards to offload the I/O load. (I used to design them)
thats what I thought too. An AS/400 e.g. was able to lift the workload of a whole company and he is fxxxking around with games in a 2 user environment...
But could it teach people to use windows? This is apparently a valuable and rare skill that cannot be picked up should the need arise.
Just think of how many terminals a modern eight core laptop could support… or a threadripper 🤣
The hard part would be finding the users who wanted to use your terminal…
When I was starting out at a telco (Telstra Aus) I remember seeing quite a few Olivetti box's that ran unix and talked to a pile of serial terminals. Back then setting up an office with multiple terminals meant running heaps of RS232 serial cables back to a 'server', everything was text based. I actually think more work got done back then, as the users couldn't stuff around with the computer, it was setup to do what it did and that was that.
When we went to PC's, we then had to employ a pile of extra support (IT) people to go around finding lost icons and resetting screen resolutions etc, that users would stuff about with and break their workflows.
One twit discovered laplink and would clone one machine to another because he thought the other looked better, of course he broke several machines, as the hardware did not match - wrong driver issues deluxe.
@@paulstubbs7678 Olivetti in Australia... As an Italian that's really nice to hear :D
I've been binging your content today, I love these long-form in-depth videos on these things, I find it endlessly fascinating as its the hardware I grew up on. I see we really didn't need two computers at home back then. Just a couple moniors and keyboards and me and my sister could've done our homework ect at the same time. this could've saved families lots of money really. cool channel, I like your content - its exactly the kind of thing that interests me.
Both the device and this video were wildly impressive. Thanks so much for making this!
Thanks so much for watching it!
33:34 It's actually possible to get Starcraft to boot and run in 800x600 or other custom resolutions. It's the same old editing a config or variables file trick that was pretty common of the era, would be interesting to see whether that actually got it to boot or not or whether there's some other issue there
you run Starcraft, not boot it. Booting is what a computer does when it first starts up. Look it up. It's an interesting term.
Well, you also boot into windows, and virtually every game that was "windows compatible" in 1995-1998 area was really just running did, so would argue that "booting" would still apply.
@@lilsammywasapunkrock , because it was just running did? The operating system starts itself. It is not started by anything else. It pulls itself up by it's own bootstrap. That is what booting means.
@@NickRoman in that case wouldn’t the BIOS “run” the Operating System since it chooses what device to boot from
@@hunterlong1820 , you might say that. It seems a bit beside the point of the distinction between what the machine does to get the operating system running automatically and a person telling it to launch a program afterward. To me, the meaning of boot is pretty clear and easy to understand--in spite of not being familiar with the term boot straps. lol
Who are you and why have I never heard of you before? Subscribed!
And you have your video divided in to chapters! Friggin awesome, man!
So cool. I remember about 10 to 13 years ago finding a modified version of RDP that would allow more than one person to login at the same time. I'm sure this runs in a similar fashion. Great video...
It is extremely rare for me to find myself totally absorbed by a video these days, but I must congratulate you on this wonderful production. I think that maybe in part it struck home as I have actually owned an Ncomputing setup which I (unsuccessfully) attempted to get running with Linux. Thank you :)
I recently set up gpu-p in hyper-v for multi user gaming, so seeing this setup with pentium 4s was incredibly interesting. Thanks for putting in the effort!
27:29 anti-counterfeiting. Ghost shifts and cloning were a problem even back then, and one way to combat it was (and still is) to have the software refuse to operate if it can't authenticate the hardware.
There are more elaborate ways to do this but something as simple as an obscured rule for what makes a valid serial number can often be enough to stop a shady manufacturer from outright cloning your product--as often they don't even bother putting unique serial numbers on their counterfeit units.
Thank god for open source amirite
Couldn't they just read out the sn from the hardware when connected maybe?
Honestly, The Web is pointlessly complicated at this point. Sites from 2005 are more usable than most made last month.
as a web developer, i apologize. every site has 20 gb of javascript libraries loaded for no reason and i hate it, too
@@boyadh So don't load them
@@boyadh damn 20gigs 🙀
Yea but, that’s because who we build the web for has grown immensely since 2005 and due to this things have gotten way more complicated . Back in the day you just needed to make an English website that worked passably on an 800x600 desktop. Now, when you make a website you need to make sure it works for 1920x1080 Desktop and mobile and everywhere in between and this is just a simple example. A lot of features that were relatively simple back in 2005 (or stuff you didn’t even need to think about back then) have gotten a lot more complicated. Accessibility, security, internalization all have gotten way more complicated since 2005.
@@boyadh Don't forget to add the whole bootstrap lib for just 2 icons
Darn. I got so distracted reading the book you wrote and the calculations you made about the money you earned (and laughed at the miscalculation) that I had to move back in time a couple of times....
Thanks for the informative but mostly entertaining video!
Fascinating. Having worked with CPM86 for PCs where you could run multiple dumb terminals from a serial port expander on PCs and RTC86 that allowed 24 dumb terminals from Microchannel serial adapters in a PS2 Model 80 or Model 95. In reality you would use some ports for printers in a print server type queuing system but to see a room full of agents with Wyse 120 monitors all taking bookings all powered from one PC, and then seeing that PC running modems and printers at the same time does, as you said, prove that most PCs are way more powerful than users actually ever need, with exceptions.
In 2011, I had used this setup in a C programming class, but it was a bit different and ethernet controlled using a LAN switch and a Xeon Workstation CPU. The system had 15 -18 terminals set up.
The virtualization using a cheap FPGA is really impressive.
Wonderful content.
Cheers ✨✨
Sometimes when I watch your essays, I wish that I WASNT into tech and retro tech. Because I’d like to test my theory that I’d still enjoy your videos if I knew nothing of what you spoke. You have a way with your words, very easy for anybody to follow along with. I’m sure I’m not the only person that clicks one of your videos, realized about 10 minutes in that I watched that video already 6 months ago. But even still I just stay! Keep up the good work. Speaking to people is your calling
I found this more fascinating than I could have ever have imagined.
The later modules were at my school, we used them as a cheap computer lab. We had like 30 of those things hooked up to one pc and we all managed pretty well just using a web browser and word processor.
You do a good show not just this one. UA-cam took me here. Long ...i thought...ok lets try....an hour later im still impressed...no bs lots of info. Love how you develop the episodes...nice work
Speaking from my personal experience Aster has been fantastic. Ran it for years and years. Best way to multiseat on one graphics card from what I could find.
I actually ran into this sort of system in production! In middle school, we had a few small labs in the english classrooms where they had a single, central Core2Quad machine with plenty of RAM, and on each side 3 workstations running off of these zero clients. They were neat, but if you knew what you were doing, you got the central seat if you could... It's also interesting to note that, much of the time, these organizations that used these had full AD implementations as well -- in many cases it was not just loading 7 profiles at once from the disk, it was sometimes *creating* profiles for fresh logon credentials.
I couldn't agree more and couldn't have said it better myself! Well done!
This was absolutely astonishing, hats off, posting lots of citizen kane clapping gifs
I wish I'd known about this at the time
Wow amazing content!
Never seen an hour go so fast, I was on the edge of my seat the whole way through!
How far can it actually be pushed?
CRD! I love your jokes man, one of the many reasons I'm subscribed and also why I keep watching!!!! :) :)
This video was awesome! The amount of things you tested, showed, documented… can’t wait to see more from you 👏🏻👋🏻👋🏻